RadioBanter - Degen DE1123

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It's thin, really thin. Much thinner than you expect it to be. Build
is reasonably solid, but the band selector switch looks likely to
fail
first, even before the skinny unrotatable aerial gets bent. The lack
of a backstand makes things worse; listen to shortwave with the radio
teetering upright or have the radio and aerial flat against the
table.
Try it in your shirtpocket and you'll spear yourself in the chin.
Hold
it in your hand and the reception jumps around, and the back vibrates
so much your fingers tingle.

}}

How does this er behave if you attach 4 - 10 feet of random wire to
the antenna with an alligator clip?

I have a Degen DE1105; which, because of its diminutive size, suffers
some of the same problems

It'll handle an external antenna just fine, picking up europe from the
Left Coast !

Give it a shot

Chester

On Nov 22, 4:12*am, Duncan wrote:
On 22 Nov, 09:04, "Brenda Ann" wrote:

"Duncan" wrote in message

...

Ann, does that mean in comparison to DE1102 / 03, SW reception of the
DE1123 is not satisfactory?...

Alan, I have both and the DE1123 is nowhere near as sensitive. My full
review is at:

...but I will happily include it here if anyone is interested.

Please do.

Ok here's my 1000 words!

===============

It is the triumph of the digital revolution. For years, photographers
sought nothing short of excellence. Then along came digital and turned
the process on its head; shoot any old crap and clean it up in
Photoshop. While purists gazed at the heavens in dismay, the great
unwashed abandoned their tripods and focussed instead on the
exhilaration of pixelling-out Uncle Jim's wandering hands. A whole
shelfload of magazines sprung up bringing digital manipulation to the
masses, and worst of all, the masses seemed to be having all the fun.

However, things don't end there. Digital jiggery-pokery can clean up
more than Uncle Jim's act. From old movies to crackly vinyl, faded
prints to cheap stereos, digital signal processing (DSP) is the
electronic washing machine that makes things look and sound the way
they should, rather than how they actually do. At best DSP allows
missing or obscured content to be assembled from the remaining data.
At worst it enables manufacturers to pedal third-rate crap, using DSP
to hide the evidence of their cutbacks.

Now, the idea of using DSP to clean up the audio from a shortwave
radio is certainly not new. Many high-end receivers have built-in DSP
to reduce noise, fading and generally cleanse overcrowded bands, and
there is no shortage of standalone processors for the rest of us. But
they are expensive. Expect to add £150 to the price of a good receiver
for the privilege.

Then along comes Degen with the DE1123, a shirt-pocket shortwave radio
with built-in DSP for about £60. Is it another gem from Degen, or
cheap rubbish that needs DSP to make it listenable?

Now I am glossing over the fact that the DE1123 is also a 1GB mp3
player, after all your mobile phone is probably more capable. And also
that it can record from the radio and it's a voice recorder too. What
really matters is the simple question, is it any good for listening to
the radio with?

First the best bit, opening the box! Let's not deny it…

Before getting even that far the side panel entices us with 1gb, 2gb
and 4gb options! Nestling inside was the radio, a soft pouch,
batteries, strap, instructions, strange poster, USB cable and
USB-simulating power supply.

Supplied AAA rechargeables were only 650mah, and they were sneakily
hidden, presumably not to offend Americans. But then again Americans
don't buy Chinese stuff anyway because they ain't made from Milwaukee
pig-iron and hell, they like their radios expensive. Buy some 1000mah
ones instead. Earplugs are typical Degen ones.

So now to the radio.

It's thin, really thin. Much thinner than you expect it to be. Build
is reasonably solid, but the band selector switch looks likely to fail
first, even before the skinny unrotatable aerial gets bent. The lack
of a backstand makes things worse; listen to shortwave with the radio
teetering upright or have the radio and aerial flat against the table.
Try it in your shirtpocket and you'll spear yourself in the chin. Hold
it in your hand and the reception jumps around, and the back vibrates
so much your fingers tingle.

FM is poor with fizzy audio, insensitive reception and no mono/stereo
option. This is the first Degen radio I have ever owned that needed
its aerial extended for FM. The DSP seems to add an accompaniment of
thumps and thuds to every station, noises that in no way sound like
interference, more like a large book being leafed through. Remember
those strange pops during mp3 recordings on the DE1121? That's them,
but bigger! However there is one good point. The search tuning is
really fast, much faster than the display can keep up with. It rockets
through the entire FM band in seconds.

Now for AM, which is awful. The sea of clicks, crackles, bangs and
fizzing is almost overwhelming and even the most powerful stations
succumb to some extent, nothing escapes completely from the din. At
least the ferrite is aligned across the radio, but rotating the radio
does not seem to improve the reception until a very sharp insensitive
point is reached, and then the racket is back. It seems the job
assigned to the DSP is to make all AM stations sound equally loud
regardless of actual level, whilst trying to knock out hiss at the
same time. However turning down volume on this hullabaloo uncovers a
strange flaw. For some reason all the digital stuff happens after the
analogue signal has gone through the volume control. So when the
volume is low the DSP doesn't have very much data to work with and
audio gets very crunchy.

SW is much the same with weak stations leaping from non-existence to
muffled and noisy and then gone again. The DSP feels like a `squelch',
boosting any remnants of fading stations until they become too distant
and then muting them. It is especially horrid with rapidly fading
stations, the pulsing effect is impossible to follow. But occasionally
there is a small surprise. Switching between the DE1121 and DE1123
both tuned to Vatican City 7250, at one point the former lost the
station completely while the latter grimly hung onto it. For a brief
moment the DE1123 was pulling in a station that its older brother
couldn't hear! And when you do get a reasonably strong station the
reception is rock steady.

The compliment of six very multi-functional buttons makes operation a
bit of a challenge. There is plenty of room for a numeric keypad below
the speaker but then it wouldn't look quite so similar to an IPod
would it? A big IPod. That resembles an IPod in the way that Speak and
Spell resembles a Blackberry. Instead there is a combination of short
and long presses for almost everything. For example the difference
between deleting a memory and deleting all the memories is how long
you hold the button for. Don't expect much guidance from the display,
which can't even display the frequency without resorting to different
sized digits as the designers felt it was more useful as a clock.

It's not a good in-bed radio as you need lots of volume to escape the
low bit-depth distortion, and in the dark you will bend that aerial.
Using it as - literally - a shirt-pocket radio will eventually lead to
a chin-aerial-juxtaposition because you must extend it, unless you
bravely stick to medium wave. The minimalist awkward interface with
segmented display and silly buttons makes you really want to slap the
designer. And again for no longwave, no stereo/mono switch,
unbypassable DSP, no keypad, dire audio, everything. Recording from
the radio is an afterthought and not seriously implemented, nor the
MP3 player.

I really wanted to give the DE1123 a great review but from switch on
it was immediately apparent that this would not be the case. Despite
being of the DE112x family, it seems closer to the DE108 in
performance. The DSP adds the ambience of a blind man in a furniture
shop and an omnipresent digital fizz makes you yearn for old-fashioned
hiss.

As more and more hybrid radios arrive it is strange to reflect how
sensible the DE1121 is, despite panning it for being so weird such a
short time ago. The DE1121 was a slow seller for Degen, the DE1122
even worse and now we have the DE1123, suggesting that Degen attribute
commercial unpopularity to insufficient styling, not capability and
usability.

Maybe digital manipulation isn't the liberation of the digital era
after all, it's the necessity. And the DE1123 needs it more than most.