In article ,
tommyknocker wrote:

I've been playing around with my Degen 1102 for a day or so, and here
are my opinions: It has good sensitivity but it has a tinny sounding
speaker. It sounds like the cheap transistor radio you had as a kid.

Well, sort of. Actually mine sounds OK. Between the tone "Hi/Lo"
switch and wide/narrow bandwidth, you can get decent sound. Also, try
using headphones. Even the supplied earbuds sound good.

The
blue backlight is cool looking, and it lights up the buttons too, but it
doesn't seem to come on reliably and it entails a rather difficult
button pressing procedure to get it to come on-there's no "light"
button.

Huh? This I don't understand at all. There is no "difficult button
pressing procedure to get it to come on". ANY button press will turn
it on if you are in the dark. I just spent about 6 hours using mine in
the dark - in the backyard with my telescope, checking out
Mercury/Venus/Mars/Jupiter/Saturn/The Moon. My 1102 was playing the
entire time, first listening to the OK State/St. Joe NCAA basketball
game, then scanning and listening to Holland, BBC and Australia. I
settled on hitting a volume button to turn the blue light on. I also
discovered that the light stays on while scanning!

The batteries it comes with are rechargeable type, and it takes
five hours to charge them since they don't have any juice out of the
box, so I said the hell with them and went down to the grocery store and
bought regular alkalines, which work fine.

You should have been more patient. Mine were working right out of the
box. After 6 hours of using the 1102 in the dark, they are still on
"full".

All in all, a rather nice radio but a
little too complicated to work-it has five different ways to tune it and
a complicated way to turn off the 99 minute sleep timer, in addition to
the aforementioned light.

Huh? You just press "exit" after power on to turn off the 99 minute
sleep timer. This is "complicated"?

You want complicated, try a Grundig Satellit 650!

It also has a crappy speaker. But it's a good
value for $50.

For it's size, the speaker does fine. I have the silver Kaito version.
I'm about to order a black Degen version also. I'll leave one at work
and one at home, rather than taking the one I have back and forth!

Dan

Drake R8
Grundig Satellit 650
Radio Shack DX-440 (Sangean 803a)
Grundig YB400
Tecsun PL-230 (YB550PE)
Kaito KA1102
Hallicraters S-120 (1962)
Zenith black dial 5 tube Tombstone (1936)
E. H. Scott 23 tube Allwave in Tasman cabinet (1935)