Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Grundig definitely has a winner with with the Satellit 750 radio! I am extremely impressed right out of the box with how well it performs on its own attached whip telescopic antenna and its rotatble ferrite rod antenna even for quite weak signals with both very good sensitivity as well as selectivity on ALL bands. The current price of about $ 220 on Amazon (including FREE shipping) is a fantastic value and should be a great bargain for many avid radio listeners. PROS: 1) A double conversion, PLL (Phase-locked loop), fully digital portable radio that that comes with a AC/DC power adaptor and a readable, but too brief manual. 2) Excellent weak signal reception on ALL bands (AM/FM/SW/LW/Airband) using four separate band selector switches. It really performs very well! The LW band is simply selected by double clicking on the AM band control switch. 3) It has very useful bass and treble tone dials with fm stereo through earphones (NOT supplied) as well as a continuously variable RF gain knob as well as a continuously variable Squelch control (for the airband). 4) A separate backlight control that nicely illuminates the display as well as two alarms for wake-up/snooze,etc. 5) A dedicated wide/narrow bandwidth control switch and a SSB (single-sideband) switch whose functions are controlled for the USB (upper side-band) and LSB (Lower side-band) choices by as separate BFO (Beat frequency oscillator) control dial. On my unit this system is very stable and works extremely well. If you change bands and come back to SW however you will have to reset up the USB/LSB and SSB choice to get back to your previous SSB selection however. The two bandwidth choices (Narrow/wide) on the Satellit 750 are usually adequate, but not as good as those currently available on the Kaito series of KA1101/KA1102/KA1103 or of the Tecsun PL-450/PL-600 radios in my opinion. 6) Numerous tuning methods are available including a fine or a coarse tuning setting button for ALL bands and including an ATS storage system for 1000 presets (automatic tuning system), direct keyboard frequency entry without hitting an "ENTER" key, up/down scanning keys, a fine and smooth, manual tuning knob with a dimple for your finger, etc. 7) Very high quality and very readable backlight controlled display with many many icons for indicating battery life, wide/narrow bandwidth filter setting choice, RF gain attenuation, external/internal antenna choice, fm stereo setting, etc. Clock time and station frequency are displayed simultaneously, with the meter band setting also briefly replacing the clock display during tuning of the system. 8) Good battery life is available using only 4 D cell batteries and the unit can be separately powered by the included AC/DC adaptor as well. 9) Easy channel memory presetting and automatic preset recall of the 1000 preset memory locations (100 for each band, plus 500 presets which can be arbitrarily chosen by the user). 10) It has an easy to use reset control button (but it is located too close to the manual tuning knob). 11) There are ports for two types of external antennas (with both high and low impedance type jacks available). In addition the internal ferrite rod antenna can be fully rotated manually on the top of the unit for optimizing the detection of AM signals and thefully extendable telescopic whip antenna (for FM/SW/Airband) is very adequate for many weak signals as well. 12) It has a very nice foldable top carrying handle and can also be easily moved by the two side rack mount handles as well. 13) A nice (but recessed) and sensitive analog signal strength meter right next to the LCD display as well as a line-in and an fm stereo earphone output jack. This unit also has nice rubber feet on its bottom to keep it from slipping on a table. CONS: 1) Smallish speaker, but the sound quality is very good for its size. 2) This unit cannot recharge the batteries internally. 3) Some of the knobs are a bit small for efficient control. 4) The BFO knob control is fairly coarse (compared with other similar portable radios) for full control of SSB fine tuning for such a high quality radio. One other reviewer who also liked this radio quite a lot overall also noted this lack of BFO frequency control as well (with 1 KHz BFO tuning available, but where using 10 Hz BFO tuning would have been much much better). 5) No synchronous detection circuit (for controling of fading due to interference) is available on the Grundig Satellit 750 which is present on the SONY ICF-7600GR or on the forthcoming Grundig G3 (soon to be available in April 2009). Both of these latter units are about $140-150 so $ 220-240 for the Satellite 750 seems to be a reasonable price given all its other fine features. 6) It is a faily large and fairly heavy, but still a readily portable unit (except perhaps on airplane flights!). It was built for Grundig in China specifically as a scaled-down version of its famously popular Satellite 800 radio which has a fine design with very fine reception capabilities. With the Satellit 750, they did accomplish a significant reduction in both size and weight and also a much smaller price tag (especially right now) and still retained many of the features of the Satellit 800 however.