PrimoMelon wrote:
Is anyone familiar with this company and the mods they do to the Sangan 909?
It sounds intrusting and I have been considering buying it. Any feed back is
appreciated.

http://www.radiolabs.com/products/re...s/super909.php

I had the modification done on my ATS-909 when it needed a couple of
repairs (the earphone jack went bad and the connection to the internal
batteries went bad when I dropped the radio some time ago. It stille
worked on the AC adapter or using an external battery). The display
backlighting is now a _bright_ blue -- sometimes I think it's almost too
bright at night, but very attractive.

A substantial improvement in sensitivity on both MW and SW. In most
cases it's better to have higher sensitivity, but the higher sensitivity
also means that the scanning function doesn't work the same -- it tends
to stop on noisier and non-program signals.

I wish I had a non-modded 909 here to compare the filter
characteristics, but it certainly appears that there is an improvement
in bandpass characteristics, particularly on narrow.

The speaker/audio is definitely an improvement. Originally the sound
tended to be "muddy" on music, now it's quite pleasant.

One of the mods is to remove the detents from the tuning knob and to
eliminate the muting when you are tuning. It's better for tuning weak
stations, but it also means that you can hear strange noises while the
PLL circuitry locks in both while you are tuning and when you first turn
the radio on. I'm sure that those noises are the reason that Sangean
included the muting in the first place.

Oh, yes, and the mods include a nice RCA phono jack on the back for
connecting an external SW antenna. That's rather nifty, since I always
worry about the little earphone-type jacks wearing out.

My one criticism is that they neglected to zero-in the BFO when they
were working on it, so, for example, when I tune to the center of WWV,
there is a low tone, rather than no tone. I think it was zeroed before
they worked on it.

I'm happy with the results overall, and am still very fond of my 909. My
main criticism of the radio is that it's very easy to knock over!


Northe
N6KO
Green Valley AZ