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write your own review of the Eton E5/Grundig G5.
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KG8LB
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Rating: 4/5
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Aug 13, 2009 06:24
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Gotta consider the price and size
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Time owned: 3 to 6 months
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OK,
I bought one at Radio Shack. This is the year 2009 . The price of $119.95 does not buy what it used to buy. It is also a small radio so ergonomics are somewhat compromised accordingly. In this day and age the incentives for manufacturers to even build a portable, low priced (in today's dollars) are shrinking. To compare this radio to larger radios and/or far more costly radios may be less than fair.
Of course if radios like this do not sell or if our expectations are too high, they will just go away. Manufacturers of this type radio have all but disappeared. No support from the buying public and the remaining builders will find something else to do. Indeed if the demand for this type radio is good, better radios will follow. Better radios of course may indeed cost more.
Taking the cost and size into consideration I am content that the radio is a good value. The ergos could be better but at least I have not suffered any physical pain in operating this radio.Ergos are also a subjective rating ,often what one person loves another will hate. Of course I really doubt it was intended as a top drawer DXer to be used for extended listening sessions. As a bedside radio or a radio to take along on motorcycle camping trips it does quite nicely.
For serious listening I have "other" receivers. Larger, more costly receivers.
The radio I bought has no major intermod problems and I find tuning CW and SSB quite satisfactory. The attenuator is there for a reason, learn to use it. I appreciate the fact that the fine tuning control is NOT easily bumped. Once a SSB station is tuned on the actual operaring frequency you can usually tune uo and down the band with the main tuning with minimal need to touch the fine tuning .
So, for a new radio, of this size and price I am content with the value returned. Surely it is comparable with all of the "other" current radios in it's size and price range.
Forgot to address the audio concerns.
In most modes audio fidelity is closely related to IF bandwidth. This radio is no exception. "Overly bassy" audio in the AM mode is quite easily remidied by using the wide bandwidth option that this radio provides. Actually a very nice feature for a radio of this size and price.
In fact, I find the audio quite pleasant and I appreciate having the option to narrow the bandwidth when conditions dictate.
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WB9YCJ
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Rating: 3/5
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Aug 1, 2009 08:21
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MUDDY AUDIO
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Time owned: 3 to 6 months
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I have owned two of these and each time could not tolerate the "Muddy" audio. To be extra sure, I also visited my local retailer (HRO) and indeed, their examples also exhibited the same issue.
I find it interesting how so many other reviews dont mention this audio shortfall.
What do I mean by muddy audio? Over bassy. Otherwise I liked the radio for what it is, meaning, I was able to enjoy the radio when I bypassed the internal speaker and fed the line level audio into into an external amplifier with bass/treble controls to decrease the "bass". Of course then it became a non-portable and defeated the reason to own it.
I suspect Kiwa may offer an audio mod (not sure if it addresses the bass problem). I hate buying something knowing it needs a mod or two right out of the box. However, I liked all the bells and whistles and ssb/cw reception.
At this time however, I suspect the best "handheld" ssb/cw portables may perhaps still be the Panasonic RF-B65 and the Degen DE 1103. If you want to call the Yaesu FT-817 a handheld portable, then perhaps its King of the hill if you put a "portable" type antenna on it. Followed closely by the Sony 2010 if you consider it a handheld. Ive owned all the others (Sony, Panasonic, etc). Example: owned two Sony CRF-1 portables (AVOID).
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KB3GTY
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Rating: 1/5
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Aug 1, 2009 01:51
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good for am, poor for ssb
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Time owned: 0 to 3 months
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I owned a g5 for 2 hours. The ssb was hopeless, it was very difficult and time consuming to fine tune. The distortion was so bad (with or without the adapter) that signals were uninteligable. Passport says the agc is set too fast for ssb and distortion results, but they didn't mention how bad it was. I had to reset the micro-processor 3 times during the 2 hours I owned it. seriously overloaded with an external antenna, even with filtering or attenuation. After the 3rd reset, I returned it to my local radio shack for a g6 (see review). On sw (am) the radio wasn't too bad, and some of the other features would have been nice (were I able to use them).
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N2KPE
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Rating: 4/5
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May 2, 2009 09:16
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Highly sensitive
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Time owned: 6 to 12 months
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I have read the reviews and I have to say they are, for the most part, on the money. This little radio is EXTREMELY sensitive. More so than my FRG-7 and Palstar R30 (borrowed from a ham friend). Yes it does have some "ghosts" and other garbage, but its sensitivity, while utilizing only its built-in 36" whip, is amazing. Battery life is also excellent and the padded case seems to be of pretty good quality.
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TERRYW
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Rating: 2/5
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Jan 5, 2009 21:00
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Extremely Overpriced Toy Radio
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Time owned: 0 to 3 months
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Eton once again brings us an unhappy mix of the very good and unacceptably poor, all in one greatly overpriced package. The G5 is a bedtime toy for those who still have money to burn.
Let's start with the good aspects. This is a very small radio. That makes it greatly portable. The LEDs are very bright, nicely illuminating the LCD and even the button labels - perfect for, uh, twiddling your knob while lying in bed. The speaker sound is unusually crisp and well defined, much better than the E1, but the sound lacks the depth which the comparably small Yacht Boy 400 PE has. The G5 is very sensitive and every claim of this radio being hot is correct. It has the required essentials: a tuning knob, SSB, lots of memories, an external antenna jack, a narrow and wide filter, DX/Local gain attenuator, and a clock in military time. How it executes these essentials is where the problems begin.
First, the ergonomics are quite poor. The tuning knob is too small and flush with the side of the radio. The action is nice and feels like high quality, but it's hard to grasp and tuning it for a time becomes tiring and then painful. Producing physical pain is the definition of bad ergonomics. Yet there's much more. The DX/Local and Wide/Narrow switches are also very small, flush with the sides of the radio, and hard to find and operate. The buttons on the face are tiny and tightly spaced. Any man with man-sized fingers will have difficulty hitting the correct buttons, requiring more concentration than should ever be necessary when using a radio. Many of the buttons have dual functions. For some of these you must turn the radio off to get to the second function! For others, you must hold down one tiny button and hit the next correct button before your few-second window of opportunity closes. Well, no thanks. That's all as queer as a football bat.
Secondly, the G5 has lots of ghosting for a dual conversion radio. Local MW powerhouses and your neighbor's CB up and down all the SW bands. Oh yay. Also, expect interference from TVs and computer monitors. These are common problems in portables, which simply makes the G5 yet another common and problematic portable. Switching the attenuator to Local helps this problem, but guess what? You just lost all your DX stations as well. The wide filter is far far too wide. You'll read a strong station plain as day 5 kHz away, right on top of the adjacent station your trying to listen to. The narrow filter helps, but it is quite narrow and lacks any sound quality you'd want to listen to. With the wide filter, the 49m band is full of squealing Hets, on every station which has another station 5 kHz away, which is most of the 49m band during its peak listening time. The narrow filter helps that too, but again, there went your audio fidelity.
The SSB is also rather poor. The fine tuning knob has much too coarse tuning. It takes painfully exact turning of it to get anywhere near the zero beat, and you'll find yourself twiddling blind through the HAM bands wondering which frequency they're really on and trying to cure them of Donald Duckitis. Using an external antenna in DX mode completely garbles everything in SSB, just as it should not do. And if you're a fan of ECSS for dealing with fading distortion, forget about it. SSB on an AM broadcast is a garbled, burbling mess.
If you find a powerful SW station in the clear, then the G5 is quite nice for listening over the speaker with the wide filter. Powerful stations in the clear are exactly what SW doesn't usually offer, and your options for dealing with the usual propagation problems are here few and quite poorly executed.
The memory labels are all rather odd. I never saw English letters so weird and distorted. If you give a page a four-letter label, then there's no way to have less than a four-letter label for it in the future as the typeset has no blank space in it!
The FM and MW performance are acceptable, but I hope you didn't spend $150 for those.
Pros:
very small size
bright illumination of LCD and buttons
crisp and well-defined speaker sound
very sensitive
Cons:
poor and painful ergonomics
tiny and hard-to-use buttons and switches
awkward dual-function of buttons
ghosting of MW stations up and down the SW bands
overly-wide wide filter, causing adjacent interference problems and squealing Hets
poor SSB, utterly useless for ECSS
All that pain and poor DX for $150? You have got to be kidding me, Eton. So many rave reviews for this radio tells me most people never had a decent radio in their life and are accustomed to complete and utter crap.
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KI6H
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Rating: 5/5
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Jan 3, 2009 12:05
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Tiny, sensitive & versatile
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Time owned: 3 to 6 months
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This tiny rig goes right in my book bag when I travel and I've had great fun pulling stations out of the ether when no similar radio will. I consider it the little brother to the Eton E1 I leave at home (the E1 is simply too large to carry around the world.)
I mostly use the G5 to listen to the night-time shortwave bands; local FM classical; and to monitor ham freqs when I'm in a country that doesn't recognize my US license (e.g. Mexico.) SSB works fine & I've used it to monitor 17m, 20m and 40m, both voice and CW, as well as to clean up difficult-to-pull-in shortwave stations.
It's so small I balance it on my chest while listening in bed.
Battery life is excellent; selectivity excellent; speaker excellent; solid construction; all in all a nifty little radio, which I use much more than I thought I would, especially considering I have about a dozen shortwave receivers. Only quibble is that the printing on the DX/Local switch is unreadably small gray-on-gray.
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N4CQR
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Rating: 5/5
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Nov 9, 2008 05:06
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Excellent Performer
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Time owned: 6 to 12 months
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Purchased one of these from Radio Shack about 8 months ago and have been completely satisfied with it's performance. AM reception especially.
It seems that later producation models (after mine anyway) includes the protection diodes. I added the diodes to mine (www.kiwa.com) which is a simple proceedure requiring about 5 minutes and a 10 to 15 watt soldering iron. If you purchase a G5/E5 take it apart and make sure the protection diodes are in place. There is a Yahoo group that can help you with this.
Bottom line: Wouild I buy another? Absolutely!
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WB4NAF
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Rating: 2/5
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Jan 24, 2008 20:46
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Three Bad Ones
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Time owned: 0 to 3 months
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I tried three of these radios (bought new at Radio Shack) and all were (or became) defective within just a few days.
The features, pros and cons, etc., have been well covered in other reviews so I won’t mention them here but will just say that I became fond of this little radio because of its ease of use, sensitivity, and stability for copying SSB and CW. It had a been a long time since I had tuned SSB via a BFO and it took a little getting used to, but it works really well on this radio and I was surprised at the quality of SSB reception that can be obtained. So I was very disappointed at the failure of all three radios that I tried.
• The first radio quit receiving above 3000 KHz, and once, the operating system froze up requiring me to remove and reinsert the batteries before it would reset.
• On the second radio the auto-scan was defective and the frequency readout was off by 1 to 2 KHz.
• The third radio quit receiving above 3000 KHz just as the first.
The first radio failed as I was adjusting the whip for reception while monitoring the 40 Mtr. band. Below 3000 KHz the G5 switches from the whip to the built-in ferrite antenna. The radio still received OK below 3000 KHz and on FM so my assumption was something went amuck in the front-end whip antenna tuning section for HF. So it was back to Radio Shack for an exchange.
The second radio was anxiously unpacked, batteries inserted, and switched on with fingers crossed only to discover that the auto-scan was defective. The slew buttons would initiate scanning but scanning would not stop on any stations. It was also noted that the frequency display was off by 1 to 2 KHz. So it was back to Radio Shack for another exchange.
The third unit worked fine for a couple of days and I thought I had gotten a good one, when it too failed, just as the first, as I was adjusting the whip while monitoring around 6000 KHz. And it too worked fine below 3000 KHz and on FM. So it was back to Radio Shack, this time for a return.
My assumption is that this radio must be unusually susceptive to damage from static discharge to the whip antenna. I have had many (and still have several) portable radios and this is the only one that has ever failed while adjusting the whip. My thinking is that there is either something wrong with the front-end design or there is an error in manufacture. Maybe I just happened to get a couple of bad ones from the same batch. I plan to try another but after a wait of some time. If it is a common problem surely Eton/Grundig will discover the cause and implement a fix.
If not for these problems I would give this radio a 4 rating. Not a 5 only because of some objectionable PLL birdies in the 160 Mtr band as well as a couple of strong birds from the BFO also in the 160 Mtr. band.
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KC3RT
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Rating: 1/5
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Dec 26, 2007 15:54
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I got a bad one...
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Time owned: 0 to 3 months
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After a 3-county search I was happy to find and purchase a G5. I based this receiver choice on these reviews and others.
Once powered on I immediately noticed a barrage of squeaks and squawks while tuning up and down the entire band. I also kept hearing the same local 50,000 watt AM and 43,000 watt FM broadcaster continuously as I tuned the bands. The imtermodulation distortion was so bad that it was difficult to easily tune in valid stations.
I compared these IMD results with my other receivers, Icom 756Pro3, Uniden CR-2021 and a cheapy Garmin Mini 300. To my surprise only the G5 was susceptible to the IMD interference. I guess I got a bad one so back it goes.
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DAVIDVD59
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Rating: 4/5
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Dec 8, 2007 07:37
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update
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Time owned: 6 to 12 months
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I purchased a new ac adapter for the radio from radio shack, 300 ma and the radio works well on ac on this adapter ssb signals are not garbled like on the previous adapter so I am raising my rating.
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