shortwave

The Sangean ATS-404 is a budget minded travel portable designed for the business or vacationer on the go who wants to take a small receiver along for the trip.

The radio is touted as an AM/FM stereo portable primarily, although the unit also is considered an entry level shortwave portable.

The AM sensitivity and selectivity on this receiver is only fair, and if you are close to a transmitter, the receiver can be overloaded and spurious (secondary) signals will appear as you scan the band.

FM is adequate, but the receiver is also prone to overloading in areas near FM transmitters, with stations appearing in places they do not belong.

The shortwave performance on this receiver indicates that band was an afterthought, much like some boom boxes used to include one long shortwave band for novelty value.

Even reception of strong signals available to North American shortwave listeners such as Voice of America, Radio Canada International, BBC World Service, Radio Havana Cuba and Deutsche Welle were not all they could be. The reception of good quality signals on shortwave requires a decent antenna, and the antenna on this receiver won't cut it. Attempting to hook up an external antenna overloads the receiver.

If you are looking for a travel portable with AM & FM reception, this is an adequate choice, but if you want a receiver that can competantly handle shortwave, choose a higher end Sangean model or a unit priced at $99 or above with digital readout. You'll be far happier.

I started out looking for a portable AM/FM battery powered speaker radio with digital tuning and presets. Try finding such a thing! Maybe Sangean will make one in the future. Seems the only way to get digital tuning on a portable speaker radio is to get one with shortwave capability. With that in mind, I ordered the 404.

Digital tuning is what I really like for listening to AM/FM. I can change stations easily and quickly. This radio works fine for what I use it for - - casual listening to local stations. I do not listen to shortwave, so I cannot comment on shortwave reception. However, I do use the shortwave capability for setting my watch, since the time broadcast appears on 5, 10 and 15 Mhz. There are 45 digital tuning presets; 9 for AM, 18 on FM and 18 on SW. The battery life is a little disconcerting. The manual states the following:

"Approx 16-20 hours of listening when used for 4 hours a day at normal volume using alkaline batteries. We would recommend for economy that ATS-404 be used via the AC adapter wherever possible with battery operation for occasional or stand-by use only"

FM stereo sounded very good via headphones.

This radio is the best of its type for the money. The Sangean 505 gives you SSB and a nice fine-tuning knob, but it is considerably more expensive, and also quite a big larger. If all you want is a good, small, AM/FM, basic shortwave radio with a speaker and memory, you can't beat this.

I find its reception to be quite good, on all 3 bands.

As far as battery use, it works very smoothly with rechargables. It has a 3-segment battery indicator that displays when you first turn it on. When only 1 segment is lit, it means you are getting toward the end (maybe about 1 hour left). At that point, you can charge a second set of batteries and install them when it finally dies.

You can also just disregard the battery indicator and wait for it to die, and then charge the second set. As soon as the battery power gets too low, the radio shuts off, but still retains the time and memory station settings. It can run in this low-power mode for hours. In my case, I had 4 nicads in it that died, and it took me 6 hours to charge 4 NiMHs that I use as the 2nd set. The radio's time and memory settings were still intact when I finally installed the NiMHs (you have 3 minutes to make the actual switch). Very nice!