Refolo wrote:
On Sat, 18 Nov 2006 19:22:58 +0000, weatherall
wrote:

I had to pull the batteries out of my KA11 in order to change the clock

hi, would you please tell us something about performance and
ergonomics of this little nice radio?

Thinking of getting one but unsure about quality.

thanks!

Degen rebadges their products as Kaito radios so maybe this will be of
some help. My Degen DE1103 is at best a mixed bag. As a receiver it
does a very good job of pulling in shortwave broadcast, ham, AM and FM
signals and they sound good. Degen is I think capable of maaking a
good receiver, but quality control is not what we see on Sony products
and some of the design features are either poorly thought out or were
not tested well.

My DE1103 has some flaws:

1. The tuning control is no longer consistent...turning it in one
direction can result in the display going backwards, not moving or
jumping erratically forward. Spin it for a minute and things calm down
for a while. It's a sign that the optical encoder was assembled in
less than clean conditions. Apparently this is not unusual.

2. The memories are numbered using hexadecimal...yes base 16 numbers.
Who knows why they chose such an arcane design but it severely limits
usage of the memories.

3. Transferring an AM station from memory to the AM VFO will
sometimes cause the FM VFO to jump to the FM station with the highest
memory number at the same time. This occurs with enough regularity
that flipping between the bands to catch favorite stations is much more
of a chore than it should be.

4. The LCD clock drifts by about 4 minutes a week. That is worse than
the cheapest Timex mechanical wris****ch from decades past.

5. It is sold as a double conversion receiver and yet images of strong
signals are heard regularly 900khz down.