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Reviews For: Sangean ATS-505

Category: Receivers: General Coverage

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Review Summary For : Sangean ATS-505
Reviews: 26MSRP: 129.95
Description:
Low Cost Portable RX with SSB
Product is in production
More Info: http://www.rnw.nl/realradio/rx_index.html
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
00263.7
WACARS Rating: 2001-10-12
good little radio Time Owned: 3 to 6 months.
I give this radio 5 points simply because of its all-round performance at such a good price, its nowhere as near as good as say a Drake or Icom, but then again you aint gonna get one of those for 100 bucks. I find the radio good all-round, you have to get used to it, and it does OK on ssb, it overloads a bit on ssb if you have a external antenna attached, but set the switch to local an its not bad. Well done sangean for this little radio that is priced so as to allow newcomers into the hobby with a decent new radio rather than spending a few hunder bucks.
MILO Rating: 2001-08-15
Not great, but what else is there at the price? Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
I really wanted a 7600GR, but Sony NZ in their infinite wisdom are not importing them.

I tried the 505 in the shop, and thought it OK, but was extremely unimpressed with the flimsy wonky tuning knob. However I had no choice. If I wanted to listen to SW on my budget, it was this radio or nothing.

It works well with a random wire antenna, not so good off the whip. I've received Radio Sweden, Radio Mongolia, Radio Croatia, clearly and readably from here in NZ.

Scanning is very slow using buttons, slightly fasting using tuning knob. The tuning knob is so crap, I think it would be better off without it, two extra buttons for 1kHz tuning steps would be better. It really lets the radio down, otherwise it would seem fairly well constructed. The knob skips and jumps and sometimes goes backwards when it should be going forward. I thought mine was faulty, so I exchanged it. The new radio is much the same. The new battery cover doesn't fit, and there was a bit of PCB rattling around inside the radio which didn't inspire confidence. I can't be bothered going back again. Made in China.

Only 14 SW memories.

All of the buttons are extremely slow to respond.

Jacks for headphone and antenna are rough and difficult to insert a plug into. They will fail in future when they part company from the PCB, but I'll solder them back on.

Sound is OK considering small tinny speaker.

FM & AM reception very good.

Battery life is not as good as the Radio Netherlands review would have had me think. I got about 20 hours on Alkalines.

Purely as a radio, I think it performs adequately. As a work of engineering, it's pretty miserable. It seems ready to fail, and the quality control is poor. When one buys a piece of electronics, one wants to feel good about having made the purchase. That feeling is muted with this radio. If it hasn't failed after a year, I'll warm to it a bit more.

If it cost a third of what I paid, I would be very happy with it. At the asking price I think its construction is horrible.

So I dunno, closely examine the one you are taking home before you take it home. The radio is not so wonderful, but what else is there?
SW4DX Rating: 2001-06-06
Great Value For Money. Time Owned: 3 to 6 months.
I have owned an ATS 505 for about six months,I
consider it to be a first class Reciever for the Money.
As this rsdio is made in a place other than Taiwan
I believe there could be Quality control problems,
If this is the case I got myself a little Gem.
The audio is great,SSB performance is good.
This radio is quite able to pull the weak Shortwave stations out of the hash and almost
compares to my Sony ICF SW7600g.
The only gripe I have is that the Digital Input
Buttons require to much distance to push down,
once I got used to that problem I found the ATS 505 a fun radio to use with a performance to match, I use a 142ft Helical Diapole Antenna on
this radio with no overload problems.
Congratulations to Sangean, Pitty the 909 does`nt sound as good.

Dave Humphreys SW DXer
Brisbane Australia.
AE4TO Rating: 2001-02-14
Good economical Short Wave Radio with SSB Reception Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
The ATS-505 is a good economical SW Radio. After going on the 40 Meters ham band, I was plesantly surprised at the good SSB reception. Sensitivity was good in Short Wave. I pick up several long distance MW stations. FM sounds Excellent.
My main complaint was the muting while tunning at 1 kc increments. Selectivity on the wide side. The Main tunning knob wobles and is use for going from 5 kc to 1 kc tunning and the reverting of tunning to 5 kc once any button is touched. Th e radio is a good buy specially if you buy it on sale from Radio Shack ( US $ 99 ) Good economical short wave radio with good sensitivity and SSB receptiom
VK6JDR Rating: 2000-10-24
A very average radio Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
I waited a long time for this radio to appear in Australia. I have, at some stage owned most types of Sangean Radios. I took this one back within the 7 days and got my money back.

The radio does have some good features, it looks good, has a nice tone and has adequate volume.

From what I have read of other reviews I expected it to use "significantly less" battery power - it didn't - just the usual 55 ma on idle rising to about 85 ma for a good volume. This is similar to most of these type of radios. The ATS909, for example, uses only a little more current at louder volumes.

I found that the biggest downfall of this radio was in how it tunes. When the button is pressed to change frequency, there is (approximately) a one second delay before anything is heard. Every time you want to increment up the band you want to listen to, you have to go through this press and wait process. It is tedious and slow and, as far as I am concerned, takes all of the fun out of listening and playing around on the short wave bands. This problem really needs attention. I suppose someone will come out with a modification to fix this - which would be good. If you only were to use memories for recalling particular frequencies this might not be an issue for you.

Using SSB on this radio was disappointing to say the least. Strong signals can barely be heard. It is almost not worth it - there is absolutely no comparison between this and an ATS909 or a Sony ICF7600G. I suppose that if was to be your only radio it would be better than nothing.

The final death of this radio for me was that on the lower short wave bands the radio became swamped with rubbish all over the band - virtually wiping out the received signal - this would not be so easy to fix.

I also tried the smaller ATS404 and it suffered from the same delay when changing frequencies and also the same poor reception on the lower short wave bands. My older ATS202 and ATS606 is a better short wave radio than both of these radios.

Anyway, after the many months of waiting for these 2 new radios to become available in Oz, I was lucky to obtain one of the last ATS808A's for sale in Perth at half the original price. In my view, apart from missing some fancy features of these newer radios, this (and for that matter, most other previous Sangean radios) are far superior shortwave radios. So the choice is yours - the ATS505 does look and sound good, once you have found the station you will hear it well -provided it isn't on the lower bands. This is bit of a shame really.

David Rhodes
Perth
Western Australia
VK6JDR
VE7BGP Rating: 2000-08-31
New low cost Travel Receiver Time Owned: N.A.
I own other Sangean receivers ATS-818 and ATS-909 I like a lot. I read the Radio Netherlands review on this new receiver it was very favorable. Check it out at their web site. I would like to see reviews of those who bought the new RX.