Eton Elite Executive Shortwave Radio

It's a great little radio. It's very small and would be really easy to take anywhere, to a game farm for a little entertaimnet when screens aren't an appealing thought. On a picnic, on a road trip or some other kind of small adventure. It has a great tuner, it has great features which help make it much easier to use, for instance it can scan for channels which makes it easier to find air band frequencies which are in use rather than having to scan manually, arrive at a frequency which is in use but not in use at the moment that you scan so there's nothing to hear and no way for an uninitiated listener to know that they are on the right channel so to speak. It has every feature one could want from aradio and then some. It has a sleep mode so if you're listening and you fall asleep the radio will turn itself off after a pre-determined amount of time (The one sleeping in this case is you, not the radio). A radio like this, which has a reciever that can tune into almost any frequency used for radio by people is a little window on a world that exists but is otherwise invisible. One can listen to CB or Ham radio and there are still people who broadcast tiny radio stations which exist only for a few hours a week. Hearing the converrsations between airline pilots is interesting too. There are things that happen way up above our heads, interactions between people up there, that we would otherwise be unaware of, and they're interesting. It's a great toy and an interesting and fun thing to have. It has a squelch feature, so that even when the radion signal is weak or subject to inteference the little radio can make it more audible and clearer to hear. It is genuinely a wonderful device, if you want to hear what humans, even ones who are quite far away, are putting into the world using radio waves, this thing is definitely on your side. It's unquestionable a tool you want to use for that purpose. It does chuff when it's tuned but it makes up for that by having an autotune feature (seek). The flaw? It's not that it's not a high fidelity device and that the speaker isn't a powerful speaker, which is something that's possible today but wasn't possible when this device was originally designed (Also it's quite charming and a little nostalgic that the speaker isn't the same thing that one might get in a bass boosted sound bar). The flaw is to do with the way batteries are dealt with by the little radio. It can charge batteries but very slowly, putting a couple of L-Ion rechargables in it would seem to be a good idea. But it seems that the radio chews through them even if it's plugged into the wall outlet. I've had to take the batteries out and put them into a charger a few times when I unplugged it from the wall and found that the batteries were dead. It isn't all that light on batteries and will flatten a set in two days or so from fully charged (Better batteries might last a little longer, the ones I've chosen are eveready which while reputable, well better batteries do exist), but if the charge circuiit isn't isolated and the charger doesn't keep up with the rate of consumption then the batteried will slowly run down even if the device is plugged into grid power. If you do get one and do take it on n adventure which will see you away from home for more than a few hours I'd say take a few extra batteries along so that you don't take the radio out to let it play music in the backgrouond and find that the batteries are dead.