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Show all reviews of the Eton E5/Grundig G5
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of the Eton E5/Grundig G5.
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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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