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Tesco RAD-108 AM/FM/Shortwave portable radio review - American Style

I sent one of the RAD-108s over to Two Hands and a Radio for a YouTube review. Update - looks like 2H has taken his YouTube channel down so this is no longer available. Here is mine, a poor substitute.




 

It didn't do too well on the American AM broadcast band, probably due to tuning in 9kHz rather than 10kHz steps!


I popped the covers to see what was inside. Not much, just one DSP radio-on-a-chip and an audio amplifier. The ferrite rod appears to be better than the Tecsun arrangements however as it has separate windings for Medium Wave and Long Wave.



From what remains of the labelling on the DSP chip it appears to be a AKC6955(?). It may be possible to persuade this to tune in 10kHz.

Here is the data sheet for the DSP chip - http://aitendo3.sakura.ne.jp/aitendo_data/product_img/radio/dsp/m_pcb/m6955/M6955_dshver20130625.pdf - although most of it appears to be in Japanese. From this I deduce there may also be a micro controller carrying out the tuning via I2C. I also came across some Arduino projects for controlling this chip so it may well be possible to attach an external controller to access other features!




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