am-fm

I wondered if by throwing a lot of money into a radio if I couldn't get stations which I could only slightly hear with my smaller radio. I was right - this Grundig sucks those faint stations out of the air like nothing I've ever run across before. But it's a lot of money! There's space on it for three exterior antennae. I've built and attached two antennae, but the built-in whip antenna does extremely well too. Hell of a radio, but did I mention that it's a lot of money?

Better then the reviews, blows away my Yacht Boy, designed by Drake and built by Tandy for Grundig USA. No complaints, need to spend three times as much for anything better and they aren't portable.

The Grundig Satellit 800 combines top-notch performance with ease of use, and a price that can't be beat. A superb performer on shortwave, this radio will allow you to listen to all of the major shortwave stations, and also bring in many of the smaller, lower-powered, and harder-to-hear stations. This unit has superb audio, good sensitivity, and mulitple selectivity settings. Another plus is that the radio is easy for beginners to figure out, yet has enough features (memory presets, timers, scanning functions) for fussy listeners like me. Nice big digital display and controls, too.

Though nominally a portable, it's one big, butch radio: as big as a microwave oven and absolutely eats batteries. You'll want a permanent place in your home for it, and mostly run it off A/C power.

If you live anywhere other than the eastern part of North America or Europe, you will need to put up an external antenna. It's well worth it, though; with a proper antenna this radio will bring you the world.

The FM tuner is very good; mediumwave AM performance is also better than average, although there are other models you should consider if long-distance AM is your primary interest. Airband reception is only fair; I don't know why it's a feature of this radio.

The Sat 800 did have some quality control problems in the beginning (2000) those seem to be resolved now. For this price, you will not find a better performer on shortwave.

If you spend any time at all tuning the shortwave bands, this is your radio.