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Need some advice.

Posted: Fri Mar 31, 2023 11:25 am
by Egil - LA2PJ
My old faithful PL-880 has been stolen. Forgot to take my bag with me when I went to the airport toilet, and when I returned to my table, the bag was opened and someone had taken the PL880 and my shaver! The thief was caught on CCTV, but I don't beleive I ever get my belongings back. So now I'm going to buy a new portable radio.

After reading reviews, and seen a lot of demos on YouTube, of a lot of portable radios I have ended up with Tecsun PL-990 and PL-8800, But can't really decide what radio to purchase. So now I wonder which of the two the forum users recommend.

73s
Egil - LA2PJ

Re: Need some advice.

Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2023 5:43 pm
by 13dka
If you were happy with the PL-880, the 990 (or a 2nd-hand 880) might be a reasonable replacement. The S-8800 is the only of the two I own and I found it a particularly quirky radio, it's also quite big for traveling with it.

Re: Need some advice.

Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2023 6:06 pm
by Egil - LA2PJ
13dka wrote: Wed Apr 05, 2023 5:43 pm If you were happy with the PL-880, the 990 (or a 2nd-hand 880) might be a reasonable replacement. The S-8800 is the only of the two I own and I found it a particularly quirky radio, it's also quite big for traveling with it.
Thanks for posting your opinion on the S-8800.
A few days ago I visited a HAM friend living on the other side of the county. He had both PL-990 and S-8800, so he gave me a little demo using the whip.antennas only. We tuned them to the same shortwave frequencies for comparison. The S-8800 was by far the best of them.
Just one example: whith both radios tuned to 11279 kHz USB, Gander Radio was barely readable on the PL-990 while it was good noise free copy on the S-8800. This pretty much describes the other frequencies we tried as well.
I also found operating the S-8800 a little ackward, and it was the fIrst time I ever used a remote control to operate a shortwave radio.
But I ordered a S-8800 as soon I got home. It is already sent from Hong Kong. So hopefully I'll get used to operate the receiver properly when I start to use it.

73s
Egil - LA2PJ