I have owned two of these radios and both ended up being returned because
the sound volume knob started to get noisy after only a few months of daily
use. I used the radio at my office and it was never exposed to dusty or
damp conditions. To repair the radio would have cost me more for shipping
to Toronto Canada and back than I thought the radio was worth. It's too
bad, because I agree with everything else you said about this radio. It's a
great little portable with a convenient handle on top plus it's very good on
batteries. I'll bet there a lot more of these radios suffering the same
problem I experienced, but because they are usually kept in a closet for
limited emergency use, users will rarely discover the defect.

It's too bad this simple little radio couldn't be made with slightly better
components. At one time I was tempted to get an Eton FR300, but this
experience has soured my taste for this radio model family. I hope someone
at Grundig/Eton will come across this post!

I also own a Tecsun BCL3000 (who manufactures for Grundig) and it works as
well as I expected it to. It gets used daily and the sound volume knob
operation is smooth and quiet. I would recommend this radio as a very good
emergency radio. Easy on batteries and very sensitive.





"WA4118SWL" wrote in message
ups.com...
For years, I've used my Radio Shack DX-360 and my Sangean ATS606A for
SWLing but this changed for the most part after the 2004 hurricane
season. Because I was so annoyed at not having any news sources during
the often 24 plus hours without power here in Florida, after Hurricane
Charley I bought a sand-colored Grundig FR-200 at Radio Shack for $40.
This radio proved to be much more useful than any AC or battery powered
radio that I've ever used. The construction is solid, the sound quality
is excellent and the built-in LED flashlight and hand-crank made the
power outages a little more bearable. Cranking the generator for a
minute provided nearly an hour of good sound and the flashlight came in
handy if the power ever went out at night and I didn't have immediate
access to my regular flashlight or candles. Now after almost two years,
this radio still works perfectly and the hand-crank still powers the
same rechargeable battery pack as well as it did back then. I've
cranked it for a minute almost daily since the summer of 2004 (its
being semi-waterproof makes for a great bathroom radio) and it has yet
to fail or fall apart, while the rechargeable battery pack still holds
a good charge after all this time. More recently, I've started to use
it for SWLing and found that barring the usual disadvantage of an
analog display (not knowing the exact frequency I'm on is strangely
thrilling at times), its quality easily rivals that of my more
expensive Radio Shack DX-360 and my Sangean ATS606A. I highly recommend
this fine little radio because it helped me through those dark days and
nights in the summer of 2004 and has been a pleasure to use for DXing
today.