The radio: cost - around $70 USD. Covers LW, MW (AMBCB), FM and Sw 3-30 Mhz. Am FM, SSB (USB/LSB) has an audio filter. Comes with wire antenna and rechargeable LiPO cell commonly used in Cell phones. Rechanges via a USB-Micro port. All digital. New style SDR radio. Note - there are no long wave commercial services in the US or Canada. You can hear so-called UTEs like NDBs. Short, blunt review - if you want this for listening to Shortwave, don't waste your money. Suffers badly from AM broadcast blow by. For AM reception, does well IF used with a loop antenna. Works well on FM. The SW, USB/LSB and bandwidth filter works. IF you don't get buried in local AM station bleed thru. This is a same radio sold by Country Comm - don't believe the hype. If you live in the sticks - well away from commercial AM transmitters, this may work for you. I can copy CW and the audio filters make this work. I guess I should have known that for $70 bucks, you are not going to get much. Because you don't. Compared to my Sangean ATS-909, there is no comparison. The -909 is more expensive, but you do get what you pay for there. Ping me if you have specific questions, I 've had and used this for more than 6 moths. Bottom line Do not buy. No value for the SW listener.
I have a Ham buddy that bought one from Countycomm. Your review is spot-on, basically junk. SDR receivers are wide open by design, and his radio picks up everything he does not want it to. As you said, better to spend a few bucks and get something decent.
I wanted this to work. Fellow over on the Zed has had some luck with this setup. (CW Flea + PL as a transceiver) I'm going to use my SW3B as the RX half, it is a solid HF rig, but works at 5W, I want to try QRPp for 'fun'.
I bought the Xiegu X-6100 to keep in the ammo can faraday cage. This thing has unbelievable ears on it, but does have birdies especially on 20 meters, but being a linux based SDR machine that is capable of updates, I'm sure someone will remedy that. A bunch of the caps in my Sony ICF went bad, and it was bought in 1990 so a replacement was in order. The X-6100 was cheap enough to do double duty as receiver and QRP rig. It does 5 watts on internal battery and 10 on external power.
I have one of those I bought a few years back. Never use it. I'm looking at the Icom ID-50 handheld hf transceiver that just came out. For just receive the Malahit DPS2 SDR is pretty sweet too. Russian made & It's t/s too. For the price may as well just get a full transceiver though. Even without a license a transceiver is still a good kit item.
