SIHUADON D808 Portable Radio Transistor AM FM SW LW SSB Air Band Multiband Radio Loudspeaker Alarm Clock Sleep Timer Black

Product Information

The PL-660 has 2 (I think unspecified) ceramic IF filters for SW, which are doing a good job serving 90% of all typical purposes for such a radio. The D-808 on the other hand utlizes the DSP for IF filtering and offers whopping 11 different bandwidths (6 on AM and 6 for SSB), this is even more than the PL-880! This sold the D-808 to me the most, for example I like to improve my very poor CW listening skills every so often, and always having an even narrower filter up the sleeve can save otherwise hopeless DX reception in the ham and broadcast bands. But are they any good?

Hello. I received the XHDATA D-808 today. A nice little radio. I am however wondering if anybody out there knows how to deactivate the Alarm function? The instruction manual is vague regarding this. Other than that, it seems to abide <10m/30ft of wire just fine and it gets along with my ML-200 active loop, currently indoors with a rigid 80cm aluminum loop, unless the RRI transmitters populate 49 and/or 41m after midnight. That station occasionally hits the 9+60 mark on my SDR with a dipole and when they’re on, the D-808 has to be tuned far away from these bands or disconnected from the loop to stop the pumping, desensitizing and intermodulation products. Interestingly, strong signals often make the filter drop out (as described under “SSB reception”) as well. A theory could be that this happens when an off-band signal (and/or the AGC causing “clipping”) makes an AD-converter run out of bits. Recent additions to the shortwave portable receiver market have been quite impressive, especially considering the continuing decline in the use of shortwave as a transmission method by broadcasters. The second pair of digits is a crude calculation of receiver (not audio!) SNR, which can be useful in conjunction with the signal strength meter, e.g. for adjusting or comparing antennas and so on, and it works best with AM and FM signals.

XHDATA D-808 AM-LW-FM-SW-AIR Portable- Tech Report

I am an owner of a new Sihuadon D-808. I have it for almost 2 months (I bought it from China during the 11/11 discount period). I also own a Sihuadon R-108 (it is an exact copy of Radiwow R-108). A typical AVD would be between 1 and 5, maybe a mximum of 10, to contain the IC noise floor under inaudible levels. But doing so would result in very low volume levels because of the missing audio pre-amplifier stage. Every company that’s still manufacturing receivers makes its own decisions. It’s as important that we voice our gratitude to Sangean for its latest (possibly last) effort to revise the 909xxxx series as it is to Tecsun for offering no fewer than THREE superb world band receivers. Shortwave Single Side Band (SSB) minimum step is 1 kHz, Upper Side Band (USB) and Lower Side Band (LSB) reception independent I have both the D-808 and PL-660. I have to say my experience is contrary to some of the findings in this review. My PL-660 trounces the D-808 on LW. It’s not even close. Even at night here in the UK the D-808 struggles to get BBC Radio 4 on 198khz. Pretty much nothing else. The PL-660 pulls in all the main stations from Europe, some very strongly. On MW they’re both very similar, a slight edge to the PL-660. This amazed me because when I got the PL-660 the other day I was buying on the expectation that MW and LW were poor. A bonus!

In what could be the final models from Tecsun, we saw the PL-330, PL-990x and H-501x all of which bring impressive features and capabilities to the game. Sangean finally introduced its upgraded ATS-909×2 including an early firmware upgrade that was supposed to correct some issues with this receiver. Our SIHUADON D808 and XHDATA D808 are identical in terms of performance, they are also produced by the same designer and the same manufacturer, and they are also sold in our shop. The portable radio manufacturing industry has changed pretty dramatically over the past few years as much of the advanced technology used by foreign companies in their radio factories in China has been “appropriated” (to use a generous term) by new Chinese competitors. Without getting into the political ramifications of such behavior the obvious fact in the 2021 portable radio market is that all of the top competitors in this Shootout come from factories in China, and four of the five have Chinese name brands. For those who feel uneasy about this rampant copying of foreign technology the American-designed C. Crane Skywave is still available, although even it is still manufactured in Shenzhen, China—the nerve center of such copying. I’m wondering if other D-808 owners reading this have anything to comment on the legibility of their LCD panels, as I’m not sure if mine was fitted with a mediocre digital display or the poor contrast is the norm. I’m thinking of requesting for an exchange within the first 30 days’ warranty period but the rest of the radio is fine.My 2021 unit came with 3.81V in the battery (still a XHDATA 2000mAh device) and the battery level indicator had 2 bars. So particularly on LSB, the offset on my D-808 varies quite a bit over the entire coverage range but I think this is within the allowable tolerance for such a radio. The PL-660 has slightly better results but it also has a center-indented fine-tuning knob making small corrections quite difficult. In AM mode they are both spot on. Thank you for sharing this technical overview of the XHDATA D-808, Gary! I’m looking forward to the antenna mods you’ll no doubt make to this compact DX machine!

Charging it from a USB charger or laptop USB port introduces some additional noise on AM/SW of course, trying a cheap power bank worked out much better in this regard. There is much room for improvement though – for example the slightly borked control of the DSP, the chuffing/tuning and AGC issues on SSB let the D-808 miss the title “most stunning cheap little radio ever” by a hair. Only below 3 MHz it’s not all that great on the whip, and that’s where the D-808 beats it – listening to top band (160m) hams works surprisingly well for a 25 inch whip. Between 3 and 30MHz the D-808’s sensitivity appears to be almost on par with the PL-660, the PL-660 often wins in terms of intelligibility at the “minimum discernible signal” (MDS) threshold. For example, on a day with bad conditions Gander Radio on 6604kHz USB had a barely audible signal on both radios. But I could occasionally decipher some words on the Tecsun that didn’t make it through the noise on the D-808. These photo finish victories for the PL-660 can be observed across most bands, but it needs ridiculously weak signals to spot the difference.

Great review. Would be interesting if you tested them both with a passive MW loop as I find that the xhdata is rejecting signals rather then enhancing them and raising the noise floor, whereas the Tecsun pl-880 will accept the tuned passive loop. For me, the unique combination of size, sensitivity and selectivity is making up for the shortcomings, it certainly remains a very interesting radio and I can’t remember carrying one around that much, ever.