Owl writes:
The first model from Redsun is in fact RP2000 (not sold in mainland China but still available re-badged in some other countries) which has not station preset at all! The 50 presets was added to RP2000 to convert it to RP2100 in the last minute before Redsun decided to release the radio in mainland China a few years ago, after receiving many complaints about lacking station memory on RP2000 - that's why RP2100 has such a strange "better-than-nothing" preset scheme.
RP2000 was cleared designed as the successor to Tecsun BCL2000/3000, i.e. a digitised 1970-style BCL radio (the lineage is best shown by the slider switch hidden behind the psudo-rotatory band switch presented on both BCL2/3000 and RP2000/2100).
It's said they might have been designed by the same engineer who once worked at Tecsun but moved (along with some designs) to Redsun...
As for the off-board BFO unit, if you refer to the one sold on ebay by TQChina, it's not a Redsun product but designed by TQChina and co. (they also have a 455k-12k down converter prototype but it is difficult to get the required parts esp. cystals at a reasonable cost for commercial production ).
The IF-out is very convenient if you have the down-converter so that you can play SDR or receive DRM. I can understand why manufacturers like Tecsun/Redsun are a bit heasite in making such accessories. To use these stuff properly, certain amount of knowledge/skill are required. Unfortunately, many users have far too high expections on the performance of these accessories while on the other hand they lack the required skill/patience. A good example is Degen's loop antenna DE31. As far as I can tell, the majority of complaints towards it are due to unrealistic high expection or incorrect operation by the users.
It's true some critical parts (mainly IC) for traditional radios are more and more difficult to find. It's said Degen DE1103 will soon be out of production. Tecsun's switch to DSP chips is more or less for similar reason.
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