Grundig S350 and S350DL

[ke4cij]

Nothing is built good these day! Recently had a chance to try out a couple of Grundig Eton S350 and S350DL radios. Both are Analog but have digital readouts. I guess that would be good if the radios didn't suffer from severe drift problems. If the temperature changes slightly the radios will drift several KC's up and down the band! They seem to work best at around 70 degrees. Both have basically the same tuning knobs that are larger and work well with American hands, but again they have problems with backlashing. Both are single conversion radios but offer decent SW experiences using the built in antennas. Its useless to hook up and out door antenna because both the radios overload have problems in seperation. Both are Rock bound on AM SW and you can hear anything SSB so really as a shortwave they are short on the wave! LOL Both radios have RF gain and a Low and High filter but these are worthless as I see it. The both have attnedators which are pretty much useless. Using both the filters, rf gain and the att, you might get some decent reception! Might is the key word!

FM and AM proformance is lacking but the sets can produce a good quality sound! Again its useless to use other antennas due to seperation problems which leaves the stations grabbled and jumbled.

Removing the covers, which are cheaply made and easy as smack to brake you'll find a radio that is very cheap in constuction and the electronics, other than the digital display and a couple of chips reminds me of early 60's technology. Worse even than the cheapest Japanese radios of that era.

Over all I would rate the radios as junk and wouldn't recommend buying unless you could pick one up for less than $20 bucks new, not used.
Both suffer from bad electronics, terrible craftsmanship and really are not worth the amounts being asked at Stores Like Radio Shack or other vendors. Even on Ebay they ask way to much for them! For a lot less money you can get a better radio with more options. Although the S350 with its retro field radio design will grow on you. I don't know who came up with Field Radio unless they planned on you throwing into the field because its junk and certainly isn't rugged enough to claim that name. It isn't a radio one would carry outside or bang around. If you do it will break and never work again!

The S350 goes for around $60 bucks on Ebay
THe S350 DL which is the delux model goes for around $80 to $100 and neither are worth much over $20 brand new in the box, infact a better price would be $10 maybe for the both! I still have not figured out where they got delux at, its the same radio in a bigger box and speaker. Oh it does have some sort of new add on that is supposed to make it stable and help with drift, it doesn't help! It still drifts! All you have to do is breath!