Review on 📻 Sony ICF-F10: Portable AM/FM Two-Band Battery Transistor Radio by Victor Anderson

Bought this portable transistor radio and have been using it for four months, long enough to honestly test it. Wouldn't buy it again. Like everything in life, this radio has good and bad sides. For me, the bad outweigh the good. First, here are what I consider to be its strengths. It offers quite loud volume when you need it, useful if you use it in a noisy environment like the beach, garage or work. I also use the radio an average of an hour or more a day and four months later I'm still using the original batteries. I think it's wonderful. It also offers an audio jack, which my smelly iPhone doesn't have, which might be handy for some people. Also, I accidentally dropped the damn thing three times from a height of four feet onto the wooden floor and the radio was not damaged or damaged in any way. It's pretty strong, even quite remarkable in my opinion. Finally after four months of use nothing has fallen off, loosened or deteriorated so I have to admit it. Okay, now for the cons. Firstly, the reception is sometimes just terrible. I'm listening to a local AM radio station whose antenna is a few miles from my house. The station has a clear channel, meaning it's one of the very few 50,000 watt stations in America. Did you get it? Fifty thousand watts. I listen to this station on my car radio 200 miles away when I travel. However, the reception of the Sony ICF-F-10 radio in my house, a few kilometers from the transmitter, is often chaotic and suffers from interference, noise and other hum. Not always, but too often. Good reception is the whole point of a radio so that you can clearly hear what you are interested in and that radio often falls short of its primary purpose. Also, the volume control on the radio is of poor quality. You can turn the volume down quite well, but only up to a certain point. Then the volume just disappears. For me, I can't turn the volume down to a comfortably low level. Either very loud or almost switched off. There doesn't seem to be room for a low, but still useful and desirable, comfortable internal volume. This often rendered the radio unusable and made me really angry. Next, the tuner in the radio (a typical variable capacitor style) is crappy and insensitive. It's too difficult to tune into a signal and the radio requires too many minute-long dial wheel adjustments to get a clear station. The signal then constantly drifts, so after all that extra effort to get through to the station, the signal degrades and you have to keep going back to the radio and retuning to the station. The constant retuning is just a colossal pain in the back. Also the on/off switch is too small, a tiny slide switch point attached to the side of the case, not a nice big toggle switch. It's just too difficult to use. Additionally, it also doubles as an AM/FM switch, meaning I sometimes unknowingly switch to the FM band and get glitched when I think I've just successfully turned on the radio and should be receiving my regular AM station. It's also impossible to turn on the radio with one hand. The custom switch design requires you to hold the radio with one hand while using the other to flip the complex switch to the on position. One-handed operation isn't possible, so I want to use this thing every time I turn it on. Then there is a problem with the location of the switch - next to the audio jack. If you try to turn on the radio without looking at it, the audio jack and the crappy little on/off slide switch feel identical. For the last four months I have repeatedly tried to turn on the radio without success. until I stopped what I was doing and looked things over, only to realize I was pressing the audio jack and not the switch. Just a crappy design element, an inexcusably badly designed aspect of the radio. I suspect the radio's design dates back to the 1970s, when Sony has long since recovered its original design and development costs. Is the Sony ICF-F-10 wireless receiver useless? Absolutely not. Sometimes it works quite well, but only sometimes. Given that there are many other radios out there, I think there are many more modern designs that will work much better, especially given the fifty dollar cost of these radio commands. If this radio was the only one on the market it would be an acceptable purchase. But with a mountain of other radios to choose from, Sony had to up its game. a whole year now. It's worth noting that I'm still using the original battery that I first installed a year ago. This is really very amazing and surprising for me. Due to the high volume, this radio can play at any time, such an amazingly low power consumption shocks me and is very pleasant. In terms of reception, my biggest criticism of this radio is that it remains unfortunate. It seems to me that the radio is tuned to two stations at once. The first is the station I want to listen to, it sounds loud and clear, the voices of the announcers and speakers are quite clear and pleasant. The radio station I want to listen to is being overlaid by a second source with the most annoying hissing you'll ever hear. Static changes, random changes in tenor, quality and intensity, making trying to listen to the tuned station incredibly annoying and tiresome. It just drives me crazy sometimes. Human Factors engineers know that static and white noise are some of the most annoying and troublesome noises possible for the human ear, and the Sony ICF-F-10 portable AM/FM radio is nothing short of terrible at this regard. My opinion of this radio is now even worse than when I wrote my review above. Get a radio with a digital tuner and a modern radio antenna. Cell phones operate in the radio frequency (RF) range and rarely, if ever, experience problems with reception due to the tiny RF antennas that are packed into the very small body of a smartphone. This shows that GREAT radio reception is independent of the antenna size and the Sony ICF-F-10 portable radio has tremendous space inside the case to accommodate a superb radio antenna with excellent radio reception. The fact that this radio is of such unacceptably poor quality and horrible reception is a reflection of the horribly poor electronic design and horribly cheap and poor components used in the manufacture of this horrible radio. Run, don't walk, from this radio. What a piece of shit! UPDATE NO. ZWEI: OK, here's a long term (over two years) update for this portable AM/FM radio. That sucks. Here I said it. That's all you need to know. This is complete nonsense. He cannot adjust to a clear signal to save his life. It's terrible. I've just ordered a new radio to replace, some unbranded Chinese radio that offers a digital readout and digital tuning (no variable capacitor). I just received it today and will give a review as I've been using it for a while. Sony, which I bought and endured in agony for too long, is going to the rubbish heap. waste of money. But it's definitely effective. Batteries practically do not consume.