Surprisingly good radio.

I am used to old-school radios from ICOM, Yaesu, Kenwood, Grundig, Alinco and many more. They all used to be heavy constructs with an enormous amount of components inside. This is an SDR radio so it demands a minimal amount of components, still quite a lot of attention to detail.

When I was a kid I had a lot of multi-mode radio modems that could decode CW, RTTY, Fax, SSTV etc. and it demanded quite an expensive modem, plus you needed a computer connected to it in order to read the communication and decode it.

With this thing, if you want to hear for example a Morse (CW) conversation you just go to MODE, DIGI and select CW, and the filter narrows to 500hz, and you get a scrolling line of text decoded from whatever morse you're listening to.
Same with RTTY, except then it's several lines with a scroll function. There's even a way to output that via USB to your computer as well.

This radio is way better than a lot of previous versions apparantly because many SDR dongles including stand alone SDR radios doesn't have an LNA or High-Z, this one has both. Here's a tip. Turn off Wifi, turn on LNA and High Z when listening to ShortWave via the included antenna, you'll be surprised how sensitive it is.

Here's some pro's and cons:

Cons:
- The dial is not good, it does slip and skip after a while, and it feels "rough" you may want to change that for a better rotary encoder.
- The internal speaker tend to scream a bit when you turn it above a certain volume, it seems to be rattling the metallic case.
- The wifi can be flaky at times.
- The bluetooth isn't super useful, it works with some units and then not.

Pros:
- A very affordable SDR radio with a colour touch screen, easy to use.
- Very sensitive receiver, more sensitive to signals than noise.
- Intuitive and easy to use menues (ps: protip - if you're upgrading for the first time, do it via USB and don't erase the license)
- Lots of cool Decoder options

Amazing seller and even more amazing little radio . I went and bought a firmware update key not knowing the current key means you get future updates .

Tested on WFM radio . 40m ssb and also decoded a 20m FT8 signal from my yaesu at around 1w (2db reading on ATS-25 Max Decoder II).

More than happy with this interesting radio . Still not sure what the purpose of WiFi and bluetooth is for though? Perhaps updating propagation and bands etc etc? If you could let me know I would be grateful