It may be best to turn on the automatic only occasionally to set the clock, then turning it off again. The D-808 shares the “power off” settings scheme with the Tecsuns – some functions like LW on/off, the FM band coverage and so on are set when the radio is off. My ham/DX friend (and SWling contributor) RTC turned me on to the 14” PK loop LW antenna, and it has really changed the game for me.

My favorite of the three for SSB and ECSS operation on SW broadcasts is the Eton with its 10 Hz resolution. This is not the same as the Tecsuns which actually enable you to re-calibrate, and with adjustment that remains set for both USB and LSB. A real long shot would be to hope for the same sort of calibration adjustment seen in the Tecsun receivers.I have used that same 2000mAh battery for a month in my 808, and that’s while using the radio at least some everyday. Even though I fled to the less crowded upper region of the 20m-band and it was an hour after sunset so the band was closing, I noticed the AGC was pumping a lot while listening to a contester with a moderate signal.

Therefore the supplied 2000mAh battery would last for around 50 hours of continuous usage at low volume levels, or around 16 hours at maximum volume. Another issue is an occasional effect that sounds and feels like the filter drops out when you tune through the band. One strange quirk is that the Si4735 DSP chip is located on the RF board (close to the center right edge). The D-808 has no such thing and that makes it at least as vulnerable to overloading from good conditions or big antennas as the PL-660 without attenuation.In conclusion, I go back to a question that occurred to me as I used the Sangean ATS-909×2: what Sangean could or should have learned from the D-808.

To what extent Sangean designers looked at various other portables, including the D-808, we will probably never know.This difference is partly due to the fact that the D-808 seems to be a tad more noisy and partly owed to the better speaker of the PL-660.

The chuffing noise is making tuning through the band quite bad in SSB mode, it’s even worse than the early digital “keypad”-style radios in the 1980s: every tuning step is causing first a short muting of the signal, then audio comes back with a loud “chuff” from the AGC kicking in with full gain – tuning sounds like a model railway steam engine sound chip gone mad. I use FiiO Q1 amp which has a digitally stepping volume control which eliminates any stereo channel imbalance at low volume. The PL-660 is poor on LW and Deaf on MW great on SW and has great Sync Detection I wish other radios had, the wider filters can be an issue with SW DX’ing but changing to LSB/USB can make all the difference. Most of my radio listening of late is done with a Sangean ATS-909X (2015), Eton Grundig Edition Satellit (2017) and Hammarlund SP-600 JX-21 (1957).

As a result, the provided 2,000mAh battery powered the radio continuously for remarkable 32 hours, 14 of them with the display light on! I suppose one could take the battery out when the radio is not in use, but I have never had this problem with any other radio.