Portable SW radios might be a highly niche product now but given the technology available and how long Sangean has been making radios, there’s no excuse for some of their choices or the missing “wow” factor I got as I scanned through the SW bands. Bottom line is that the D-808 is at least very close to the PL-660 in terms of sensitivity on shortwave and I find that quite remarkable. These perform very well, and as with the other DSP-enhanced portables, the narrowest bandwidth (1K) p I suppose one could take the battery out when the radio is not in use, but I have never had this problem with any other radio.

One of my best DX catches at that time was Radio Rwanda on 6,055 kHz just before it’s sign off in the late afternoon eastern timed. Tecsun started providing this on small receivers years ago, and in the PL-880, the excellent though flawed portable that also took the listening world by storm, and in the recent 330, 990x and 501x. Other than that, it seems to abide <10m/30ft of wire just fine and it gets along with my ML-200 active loop, currently indoors with a rigid 80cm aluminum loop, unless the RRI transmitters populate 49 and/or 41m after midnight.Without getting into the political ramifications of such behavior the obvious fact in the 2021 portable radio market is that all of the top competitors in this Shootout come from factories in China, and four of the five have Chinese name brands. So… it was time to disassemble the D-808, and find out why its loopstick was such a superior performer.

The Xhdata D-808 has a powerful speaker that produces a clear and balanced sound, as well as a headphone jack for private listening.

I have tried with the 3 XHDATA batteries (the one that came with the radio and the two spare ones) and I have also tried with a Tecsun battery that I use with my Tecsun PL-880 radio. loopstick transplant modifications– proving that such enhanced Medium Wave and Longwave loopsticks will perform very well in the new, Si4735 chip- powered D-808. The PL-880 has the dreaded distortion on SSB which can be annoying, on the D-808 it’s hardly noticeable.

They all give the same result, excessive battery drain in sleep mode, which tells me that the problem is not with the batteries but with the radio. The backlight is objectionably bright on the D-808, the upside is that it serves well as a reading light and the light reflected off your hand can illuminate the buttons sufficiently to substitute the missing button lighting. The manual claims that the D-808 can’t be charged when it’s on but I found that’s not quite true–it sure takes much more time but I could top off a slightly discharged battery just fine.The tuning knob and the fine-tuning thumbwheel have quite strong detents, so they are not very prone to unintentional detuning. The D-808’s 3 7/8″ (98mm) loopstick is shown adjacent to the 2 3/4″ (70mm) loopstick of the CC Skywave models. Another issue is an occasional effect that sounds and feels like the filter drops out when you tune through the band.