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Reviews For: Panasonic RF-4800

Category: Receivers: General Coverage

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Review Summary For : Panasonic RF-4800
Reviews: 2MSRP: 450 (when new)
Description:
80's vintage tabletop general coverage receiver.
Product is in production
More Info: http://www.dxing.com/rx/rf4800.htm
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
0024.5
VE4HAM Rating: 2007-03-31
Fantastic and beautiful long running set, without a flaw Time Owned: more than 12 months.
Back in the days they were selling these rigs, there was a 2 stores opposite of each other , one selling the Yaesu FRG 7, and the other the Panasonic series 4800.
The Yaesu was phase lock loop, but not digital readout. It was a toss up. I went for the Panasonic.
The Panasonic wasn't that bad in drift, and had hordes of functions to operate. If a station had a schedule of frequencies online, one could zoom right to it easily and dead on. Selectivity was great, better than the Yaesu, and it had beautiful sound with a nice audio amp with bass and treble.
Sensitivity was excellent. They had an antenna outside, and the saleperson clipped it on the back. The signals pouring in was stupendous, just hordes on the higher bands, of course it was daytime.
I bought it and still have it today without a flaw. I've used it with homebrew transmitters as a ham station, used it to do shortwave listening DX work and collecting station cards from all over the world and proud to say this receiver helped me get 346 QSL cards from stations, even cold was shortwave listeners in Russia. Back in the cold was era, in Russia, you needed to be a listener with confirmed cards from others showing they heard someone, and usually picked ham bands to do this.
There is still a lot of great programming on shortwave, propaganda as usual, religous programminng as usual, and good English language broadcasts. The Panasonic still pulls em in.
I've monitored weather fax maps on it, slow scan TV on it, copied cw, regular fax with ease all with a simple cable to plug the rec out to the computer audio card and the right software, much is freeware.
4.5/5 The Panasonic RF 4900 is only different in its digital display.
VK4XYL Rating: 2006-05-17
A good radio Time Owned: more than 12 months.
The DR 48 (RF 4800 in the US) is a reasonable radio for Ham useage. It's old and cheap, I got mine for A$50.00 and have got some very good results from it. It is sensitive, has good discrimination and excellent AM resolution. Its SSB resolution is good enough to resolve both RTTY and SSTV with a simple connection from the Record Out socket to a sound card line or mic in socket and the appropriate software.

On the downside, it has a fault with the earphone socket which sometimes shorts out and blanks off the audio, it does not have digital frequency readout for the below 2 MHz bands, and it tends to drift a lot. Also the SW band select switch appears to have lost something since the audio levels drop sharply when selecting band SW4.

All of which drops its rating to a 4 rather than a 5