Terry's Review of the Grundig G6

(Re-post)

Radio Shack has the G6 on sale for $59.99.

I found it a mixed bag:

This time, Eton brings us a radio little bigger than an audio cassette case. Yes, it's THAT small. Does the performance match?

The tiny size has a huge appeal in itself. This portable is so small, you could lose it on the table. What's next, radio you need an electron scanning microscope to see?

The speaker sound is nothing to write home about, unless you're writing home to complain. The sound isn't exactly tinny, but it is narrow and tends to fatigue your ears after a while. That isn't good. It certainly lacks the crisp and often stunning fidelity of its big brother the G5. Adequate for its tiny size, I guess, but little more, and certainly NOT room-filling. Improved through a good pair of headphones, but still less than stunning.

The G6 only has one filter width. Looks to be about 5 kHz. That's actually very good for SW and prevents the adjacent interference and squealing Het problems which the G5 has. That's probably also why the sound on the G6 is so narrow. Fine for AM, though your FM experience will be a bit lackluster.

The FM reception is pretty good, though inferior to the G5. The MW reception is pretty good too, and better than I expected from such a tiny ferrite bar. What about the SW reception?

The SW reception is no less than stunning. The G6 is nearly as hot as the G5 in that department, and sometimes I found it to be hotter. Impressive engineering feat with such a tiny whip. And the G6 is less prone to MW and FM intrusions on SW than is the G5. The G5 suffers from a lot of them - the G6 barely any. The G6 is also better with fading distortion than the G5. Eton and company got this part of the radio pretty exactly correct.

FM intrusions are all over the Air band, however. I had to collapse the tiny whip to escape them, and even then couldn't evade all of them. That's not very good. Not at all.

The signal meter is just about useless. It reads S9 for any station you can hear. Very rare to see any poundage less than that. So that is actually useless, I guess. Somebody dropped the ball there.

And yes, this tiny little radio has SSB. It isn't selectable LSB/USB, same as the G5, but unlike the G5, it isn't fine tuned with an overly coarse analog dial, but instead digitally in 10 Hz steps. That's excellent, so why wasn't this feature included on the G5? The superior SSB tuning is featured on the inferior radio on the price and class tree? Why? However, the filter is a bit wide for the HAM bands, and you'll still find yourself twiddling blindly to find which frequency an operator is really on. And when you finally get him zero-beat (something nearly impossible to do on the G5,) the wideness of the G6's filter ensures you'll hear Donald Duck from the adjacent channels. So put the narrow filter on the radio with the crap SSB tuning? Why, Eton?

The features don't stop here. There are also 700 memories, arranged exactly like on the G5, and an autoscan including an ATS mode. The memories are, well, surprising in that there are so many on this little thing of a radio. The autoscan is pretty useless, unfortunately. It's very happy to zip past dozens of those S9 stations its reading and stop on none of them. AND, the autoscan doesn't function at all in the Air band, the one place you need it most! You can't have it all, I guess. But when could you in a radio?

The ergonomics are a little better than on the G5. The buttons are even more cramped on the G6 (but you'd rather expect that.) The tuning knob (yes there is one) is face mounted, which looked like it should be great, but its flush with the front of the radio, and trying to use your thumb where a dimple should be (but isn't) means you bump against the Jog button on every full turn. Not painful, as with the G5's tuning knob, but annoying and improperly designed. An aftermarket dimple would help. Or you could make one. The Jog button lets you change the tuning speed between fast and slow, which is another nice option missing on the G5. Do you have two development teams trying to screw each other over, Eton?

And there's an external antenna jack. That's useless too. The G6 has no attenuator (bad) and unless you have one for your external antenna, don't even think about using on the G6 as all you'll get is buzz (no pun intended, seeing as this radio is named Buzz Aldrin... More radios should have people's names, don't you think?) So, another fumbled feature here.

All in all, an impressive radio. Excellent SW reception, acceptable FM and MW performance, more bells and whistles than you would ever expect on a radio this size, and some of them actually work properly. Bring it to work for show and tell, for it truly has some Wow Factor.

Pros:

TINY size (and I mean tiny!)
Excellent SW performance
SSB with 10 Hz fine tuning
filter width good for AM
700 memories

Cons:

Mediocre speaker sound
filter width too narrow for FM, too wide for SSB
useless strength meter
useless external antenna jack
useless Air band
useless autoscan
no autoscan for Air band
no DX/Local attenuator
tiny buttons
awkward dual-function of buttons
tuning knob has no dimple and you hit another button while tuning

Comments

[Travers]

Every time I see this post I think the Grundig G6 is finally on sale again, only to look again and see it's a repost! AHH! :D

[Jeffrey McMahon]

Travers, from now on I'll edit the price part. Sorry and thanks. Jeff

[Terry, the Radio Crackhead]

More extensive usage showed that the SW sensitivity is less than the G5, but still very good for such a compact radio.

Grundig Satellit Transistor 6001 (same as Satellit 210) in Near Mint Collector Quality:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Grundig-Satellit-6001-Shortwave-Radio-/140407763462?cmd=ViewItem&pt=Shortwave_Radios&hash=item20b0f47206