A More Expensive, But Not That Expensive, Portable Receiver.

On Ebay I purchased the Tecsun PL-660 portable radio receiver.

The PL-660 covers long wave (LW), medium wave (MW, AM band),  short wave (SW) up to 30MHz, the FM broadcast band (76 - 108MHz)  and the 118 - 136MHz air band (using AM). The receiver is also capable of AM synchronous demodulation and SSB  reception.

The receiver has a digital signal processing demodulator at the IF, and provides two bandwidths on AM reception, and that is a very useful feature, I found.

The receiver has an antenna input jack, specified to work on SW and the FM band. A test shows that it sooks like working in the air band as well. An external (active) antenna for air band reception should provide useful,  an FM antenna should be interesting, too.

The receiver uses 4 AA size cells for it power supply. These can be 1.5V (alkaline) or 1.2V rechargeable cells. I used a set of Eneloop (NiMH) cells, and when fully charged, they showed "battery full" on the indicator, and also tells that I was using NiMH batteries. It stayed like that throughout the testing of the radio.

The air band would have been perfect for my propagation monitoring if the VOR band 108 - 188MHz were included, but I reckon that I could use a low cost SDR for that, if need be.

A quick test showed that the sensitivity of the receiver is quite good on MW,SW and FM, as well as the lower part of the air band. The higher part of the air band seemed to lack gain, maybe due to bad tracking of the input filter.

Speaker quality sounds quite good for its size.

To me, however, it sounds like the DSP (demodulator/IF filter) could be improved, I detected some distortion, especially with somewhat noisy signals, that I never noticed on a fully analog receiver, or with my Icom IC-7300 and similar SDR/DSP heavy radios. OK, I guess that I got what I payed for ;)

I do think that this could be improved in later models. I suspect that it is not possible, or at least not easy, to update the firmware of the PL-660.

The accompanying power adapter, however was a bit of a disappointment. The adapter from US plug to EU plug did not fit into a mains socket, and just bent completely out of shape, no matter how carefully I tried to insert the plug(adapter). So I could simply not test the power adapter. I should probably try to find a suitable adapter, or simply cut the cord with the plug for the radio and make my own 6V power supply for this receiver.

All in all it is a nice and usable addition to my receiver park, I like monitoring a lot of frequencies simultaneously, to get an idea of the radio propagation conditions, be it on LW,MW,SW or VHF/UHF/Microwaves. The previously purchased "cheap" receiver is no more than just a toy, unlike this one. 

Maybe I should make another post or a few, about the setup I use for propagation monitoring. I think, however, that this should be at a later stage when I have completed more of the system.