"Paul Ciszek" wrote in message
...
Which is better for pulling in a weak, distant radio station: a
top-of-the-line analog tuner, or a digital tuner with quartz crystal
oscillator, phase locked loop, etc.?


Hi, Paul,

Believe it or not the best receivers seem still to be the old-fashioned
analog tuners, partly because of an inherently lower phase noise level in
analog tuners and partly because a couple of manufacturers have put some
great engineering into putting out really good portables.

One is the GE Superadio which always gets great reviews everywhere, and the
other is a little-known Radio Shack Chinese clone of the Superadio, their
catalog #12-903, which I believe is a little bit more solidly built than the
GE and closely approaches its performance.

Any portable with a jack for an external antenna is a plus because you can
run a lot of wire outside an bring it in through a window. This is much
better than even the large 8-inch ferrite rods in the GE and Radio Shack.
(Both models have connectors for external long wire type antennas.)

My recommendation is to stay away from the Sony ICF-SW7600GR which a lot of
people like because of its digital tuning and synchronous AM mode but I have
one and there is no comparison between it and the RS 12-903, for example. It
eats batteries like nobody's business and doesn't sound as good as the RS.
One of the other big advantages of the GE and RS are their beautiful audio
quality thanks to well-designed wide IF bandwidths and large speakers. And
you can expect your batteries to last more than 200 hours!

Another word about synchronous AM: on the Sony mentioned above, it does help
on a moderately noisy signal but it raises the phase noise even higher
compared to normal AM mode. In addition, on the very weakest signals near
the noise floor Synchronous AM isn't effective at all because it needs a
minimum S/N ratio to work properly.

One last model that you may hear discussed is the CCRadio Plus. I wrote a
review of it on Amazon.com which was later pulled for no apparent reason
although some other folks claimed that the manufacturer had pressured
amazon.com to reconsider any negative reviews of the product. Whatever
happened, I had some solid engineering data in that review to support my
opinion that it was a mediocre receiver, certainly not the stellar product
that the ads claim.

Sorry for the extra long post. Good luck in your decision and enjoy AM
DX'ing.

Regards,

Al W6LX