Brandon Reviews the Grundig Satellit 2400-SL

Weighing in at just over 16 pounds, my Grundig Satellit 2400-SL is hardly a portable radio and has found permanent residence on a wall shelf at my bedside.  The build quality of this radio is outstanding, and aesthetically it looks just like a shortwave radio should - lots of heavy duty knobs and switches.  No digital controls and nothing digital here except the display which happens to be very accurate across the entire frequency spectrum.  All the lights work and the signal meter has a very useful range.  One annoyance with the lights is that you can't turn them off if on wall power and you can't get them to stay on if on battery power.  A simple on/off light switch would have been nice.

 

I did have to take it apart to de-ox one of the knobs, and while it was apart I discovered that it has a 9-inch ferrite rod for AM and LW.  This thing is one HOT AM receiver!  I put it to the test during the daytime and was able to receive several stations which my Panasonic portables can only receive with the assistance of a Terk adjustable loop antenna.  Very selective as well - more selective on AM than any of my Panasonics with virtually no adjacent interference from moderately strong adjacents.  My only real gripe with this radio on AM is that it doesn't have a wide/narrow switch, so there's no way to get full audio bandwidth - you're stuck with narrow.  That said, its overall sound quality is still very good.

 

Shortwave performance is just as good both in terms of selectivity and sensitivity.  It does fall off above 15-meters in sensitivity, but so does every other portable shortwave I've ever owned.  It has SSB capabilities but as is the case with most analog sets, its SSB is not very stable and is quite tedious to try to tune in any SSB communications.

 

On AM and Shortwave it also has a manual gain control as well as an automatic gain control - AGC being something I didn't know even existed back in the late 1970s.  The AGC actually works quite well - I leave it in AGC mode unless the signal is really weak in which case I crank it to the max - and when cranked all the way up, this is an excellent DX machine.  It also supports an external antenna which I haven't tested - there's also a trimmer knob for tuning the external antenna.

 Now to FM.  It has 4-inch stereo speakers with 1-inch stereo tweeters which can be activated with the flip of a switch.  It has stereo FM reception and has a knob which lets you control how much to separate the stereo.  The treble is crisp and the bass is  surprisingly good for only 4x6-inch speakers.  In fact, if you turn up the volume to any significant level you have to turn down the bass down (the seller told me its because in Europe where this radio was marketed that they don't transmit as much bass in their FM broadcasts so the radios are able to adjust the bass higher than in the US - I of course have no way of verifying this).  As for reception - sensitivity and selectivity are excellent - just on the whip antenna this thing pulls in stations like nothing else I own.  ESPN 100.9 FM is a particularly tricky catch about 45 miles away but crammed right next to a local only 15 miles away.  This is my only portable radio which can pull it in with no adjacent interference whatsoever - the Panasonics do a decent job but this does a flawless job.  Oh yeah, I almost forgot - this has 6 FM presets, each individually set by 6 separate tuning knobs on the back of the unit.

 

One final feature is it does support is a line input.  I bought a 5-pin DIN to stereo RCA cord and it works great - in fact, the mono/stereo switch works with the external input as does the stereo separator knob.  So I can use it to listen to my mp3 player.

 

My final ratings:

Build quality - 10/10

AM sensitivity - 10/10

AM selectivity - 10/10

AM sound quality - 7/10

Shortwave sensitivity - 9/10

Shortwave selectivity - 10/10

Shortwave sound quality - 7/10

FM sensitivity - 9/10

FM selectivity - 10/10

FM sound quality - 9/10

Ease of use - 8/10

Features - 9/10

 

Overall I give it a solid 9 out of 10 - a definite keeper.  Will probably sell my Panasonic RF-2900 reducing my portable collection down to 4 radios - a Panasonic RF-935, RF-940 (which has become my new favorite AM radio), Grundig Satellit 700 

Comments

[Huesby]

Brandon:
I have the mono version the SL1400 and I agree with you 95% of the time(except SSB, mine is stable), this is a great and a big radio! Now on the other hand I see you have a Satellit 700, could you do a mini review comparing both of them? After buying this radio I´m thinking of buying more Grundig radios but they are too expensive as to make any mistakes.

[Brandon]

I'll see if sometime in the next few weeks I can do a comparison between this one, the Satellit 500, and the Satellit 700. I own both a 500 and a 700 (both are very similar radios) but my 500 is in need of an alignment and its a pain to constantly use the built-in trimmer every time I change the station so I will probably sell it sometime soon.

[Bob Balser]

The Satellit range was always outstanding,I used to replace mine each year from the early 1960s with the latest model,that is until they were made in China

[Drive-In-Freak]

All that bad boy needs is a cassette deck.

[Brandon]

You mean like this?

http://www.shizaudio.ru/audio/data/media/40/Grundig_RR_1140_SL_2.jpg

[Drive-In-Freak]

Oh...my, my, my. That's quite impressive.
I've always loved a boombox, and that looks like the best of both worlds. I'd love to get my hands on either one of those.

With the exception of a rare few GE Superadio Series boxes the performance of the tuner in the vast majority of them was about average. They were adequate, but not exactly DX rigs. Looks like you found an exception to the rule.

[Brandon]

Actually found one on ebay - seller wants about $490 USD shipped. Looks like its in good shape. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Grundig-rr-1140-Professional-with-tape-same-speaker-like-Grundig-Satellit-2400-/321029801898?pt=UK_Collectables_RadioTelevision_Telephony_SM&hash=item4abede07aa

Just looking at it though it looks like it lacks some shortwave features like BFO and AGC. I could see spending about $300 on it, but $500 would be a bit much for me. Still a really sweet looking boombox, probably with stellar FM and AM reception.

[Alex Farrugia]

I recently bought a grundig 1400sl off ebay Germany but I am not impressed with its shortwave sensitivity. My sony 2001D (2010), degen 1103, sony rf 5900 and sony gr7600 surpass the grundig when listening to weaker stations on SW. MW is average and is far away behind the Panasonic rf 2200. On the other hand its a good performer on LW and FM and another pro is that it doew not overload when connected to an external antenna.