Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
I owned many portable radios over the years and still I like to try out some new ones. I played around with this radio for many months now and found my personal interpretation for the advantages and disadvantages. The D-808 also has fine tuning capability. This is not the same as the Tecsuns which actually enable you to re-calibrate, and with adjustment that remains set for both USB and LSB. On the D-808 you fine tune to zero beat, but have to repeat the correction for LSB and USB on the frequency you’re on – it’s a bit more twiddly, but on my 808 the fine tuning is nonetheless very smooth. Battery life is a real pain in the ass. When I put a fully charged battery on it, (original or Panasonic ) in three days with no use at all it is dead. So you have to take battery out when not in use, or use an external battery always.
The D-808 has no such thing and that makes it at least as vulnerable to overloading from good conditions or big antennas as the PL-660 without attenuation. At the beach it exhibited very faint intermodulation even at propagation conditions that were just “not quite as crappy as the current record low” when the Tecsun did not. They were so soft that I think this can’t be heard when the noise level is a bit higher, still a bit strange. Intermodulation products seem to show up most prominently around 7MHz, 10MHz and in the 15m ham band first. I’ve been operating under an assumption similar to yours: that a retailer like Kaito USA may re-badge this radio for the US market. In the meantime, D-808 retailers aren’t allowed to be competitive in the US/Canada. Then you’re in for a treat! I did some thorough tests with the D-808 since I have it and I compared the D-808 with the PL-660 and my Alinco scanner on the Air band. The PL-660 is known for its deafness there so it lost big time, my stupid 400€ Alinco DJ-X11 is as sensitive as the D-808 but it can’t separate two adjacent 8.33kHz channels due to its abysmal AM/NFM filter. As this was not an exhaustive retro review of the D-808, I have not gone into the various negatives that every D-808 owner knows to exist.I see a section of circuit board with a chip, and components labelled C51, R10 & R6 in both sets of photos. On the other hand, tuning through the bands is a pain. Every tuning step mutes the receiver for some tenth of a second. This is nothing I want to see in a radio of the 21st century. Pressing a button gives a "brrp" sound in the speaker. Not very nice. The port is a Micro USB, fortunately. In the photo it does look like a Mini instead of a Micro, but I can confirm it’s the more common Micro.
In FM mode the stereo separation was very successful, I was able to get quite full and satisfying listening. In other bands, the speaker on the D-808 seems to deliver a more frequency-oriented sound. I guess this happens because the speaker on the D-808 cuts out some the frequencies. The D-808 is at least as sensitive as my Alinco DJ-X11 scanner and skunks the rather deaf Tecsun in this band. Unlike the PL-660 and most other small receivers covering that band it has a squelch, which is by the way active on all bands.
Can you tell me the similarities you’ve found between the RadiWow R-108 and the Tecsun one you mentioned above? This is truly a deep dive featuring five popular ultralight portable radios and examining mediumwave, shortwave, FM, and AIR Band performance. AM bandwidth control on the ATS-909×2 is quite nice. However, what leaps out is the absence of multi-bandwidth capability in SSB mode. It’s baffling that Sangean seems not to have recognized this as a must-have feature. XHDATA D-808 – (68.99) I briefly owned this one of these portable radios. Zero LW reception, zero Air band, SW & SSB were virtually non existent, battery even aftter a full charge didn’t last long. FM & MW ok. Tecsun PL-880 - I got a good one. Close in sensitivity to the 2010, has nice selection of bandwidths and great audio. I really like this receiver.
Using the D-808 again after a few years reminded me that this little China-made receiver offers no less than SEVEN bandwidths, in AM mode. Let me say that again: SEVEN (7) bandwidths. Oddly, the published bandwidth for the AM filters seem to be “audio bandwidth” (or “per sideband”) figures rather than IF-bandwidths, so they equate to classic IF filters with 2/3,6/4/5/6/8 and 12 kHz bandwidth. The only overlap is 4 kHz, hence I say it’s 11 different bandwidths, not 10. I think these AM bandwidths should cover all requirements that might come up, on top of those you can try ECSS reception with the SSB filters. SSB Reception Lets start with a baseline reference; for me its the GP5-SSB for two reasons. Firstly, the price and secondly the size. Ive seen comparisons with the Tecsun PL660 but I dont think this is an apples-for-apples comparison. When switching to SSB a “loading bar” shows up first, the entire process between hitting the “SSB” button and getting reception again takes 5 seconds. Actually, these radios basically consist of a “radio-on-a-chip” and a microcontroller so it really might be a loading bar we see there. This controller seems to be not exactly fast in the D-808 anyway, so even using the tuning knob comes with occasional hesitations – I advance the main tuning encoder one indention and the frequency changes only 1-2 seconds later. Changing bands is not exactly fast either but at least toggling between USB and LSB works instantaneously.
Then I got the 2023 version which deletes the variable coils and replaces them with fixed chip inductors. The new model now has a USB C port but otherwise looks like the 2022 version. The loss of reserve volume on AM was slightly greater than on the 2022 version although on some signals at the top of the AM band the difference was slightly less. I could no longer describe it as subtle…it’s clearly quieter on faint signals. I must add however that I could hear everything on the new radio I could hear on the older one but at reduced volume although I suppose if a trace of weak carrier was just barely detectable on the original model it might not be there at all on the newest one but that would be a very faint trace of a carrier…not any kind of listenable signal. I should also say that for slightly stronger listenable signals there was always enough reserve volume to drive the radio into distortion, so it appears this reduction of reserve volume is of more importance to the faint signal DXer than to the program listener. Yes, the original model is preferable but the difference won’t affect you unless you like to chase down very weak signals. Products to be reviewed typically should be tangible ham radio related items such as radios, antennas, towers, test equipment, feedlines, etc. Because our new product D-808, has a great influence on US market in radio, so we do not sell in US temporarily … because our competitor do not want us to rush their market. If you could understand us, that would be better.”
The S-8800 is good on LW, MW and very good on SW. A nice radio, but the distortion on SSB at the beginning of a transmission is very annoying. I find most of the DSP radios noisier with a harsher sound than the PL-660. I did a brief test of SSB. It seemed to work well and was comparable to the other DSP radios with SSB. I would rather that it worked like the Eton Elite Executive and the Tecsun PL-330 that use a single control for fast, slow and fine tuning, rather than a separate knob where the volume control ought to be. Also the PL-330 frequency can be calibrated, eliminating the need to fine tuning on SSB in most cases. Sangean made some basic decisions with the 909×2. Many of them are quite positive over the old 909x. For many users the 909×2 has more than enough features to justify the higher price of the receiver. It doesn’t need much imagination to guess what may have happened next. Eton may have threatened the manufacturer (which may be the same for the Satellite and the 808) to do their business with someone else in another cheap labor country, or maybe they complained at the Chinese trade commission (or whatever authority is in charge for that) about the unfair direct Chinese interference in “their” market.Excellent receiver and technically well designed. There is a similar receiver in the market (Digitech AR1780) but it have a issue with the battery consumption when the radio is off as it draws around 3mA and it depletes the batteries in a few weeks if the radio is powered off. XHDATA D-808 doesn't exhibits the same issue as it only draws 90uA , very similarly as other legendary receivers as the Grundig G6. At the same time the close proximity to the water results in somewhat boosted signals, so I can assess both reception quality at the lowest sensitivity threshold and behavior with strong signals. Sometimes it lets me find quirks that would go unnoticed anywhere else. Now since yesterday I own such a radio, and I’ve noticed it has aspects that are superbly resolved, but I miss a complete Instruction Manual. The pdf you have there (the same as the printed one that came with my radio) isn’t describing some matters, I will highlight just those I’ve confronted: I said I would share my results for attempting to receive LW signals on the XHDATA D-808, & if I can use a longwire to improve reception on this radio. This was after posting videos when I used around 50 metres of longwire connected to the D-808 for improved Medium Wave reception & to prove it works. Great review. Would be interesting if you tested them both with a passive MW loop as I find that the xhdata is rejecting signals rather then enhancing them and raising the noise floor, whereas the Tecsun pl-880 will accept the tuned passive loop.
Great Deal 
New Comment