Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The hand crank works pretty well but that's about all that does. The solar panel doesn't seem to do anything and the tiny 600 mAh Ni-Cad battery that looks like it's surplus from an old cordless phone only runs for a short time. The radio is really terrible, it's made really cheaply with really cheap parts that are held together with masking tape and hot glue, you can get a better radio for $1.00 at the Dollar Store. The 3 knobs on the front don't connect to rotary switches but have a lever that moves a slide switch that is really cheap and makes poor contacts so switching bands or changing the power is noisy and intermittent. The tuning knob is hard to turn but has a lot of play in it making stations hard to tune it. The speaker is really high pitched and distorted. The Weather band function only picks up 1 station but there are 4 that can be received in my area. The AM function gets a few stations but mostly noise and the FM function seems like it is going to get some stations but they are only audible on each side of the station and when it's tuned in at the center according to the tuning LED it's very quiet and distorted and not listenable. I couldn't find any real shortwave stations on either SW1 or SW2 even with an outside antenna but there are ghost images of a lot of AM stations all across the bands making them both completely useless. The radio doesn't have an external antenna connection so when you are safe down in your bunker you aren't going to be able to get anything on this radio. It has a little whip antenna that might be able to work for FM but is way too short to get anything on shortwave and when I looked inside I found the whip is not even connected to anything! There was a piece of wire about 3" long connected to a point on the PC board marked Antenna but it didn't go to anything and looked like it might have been intended to get soldered to the side of the whip antenna inside the cover. There is some kind of white stuff all over the PC board that isn't resin from soldering or that brown Sony bond glue that shorts everything out but it can't be good. Overall this radio is best to be avoided since it would be worthless in an emergency or any other time, unless you wanted even more frustration.