TecSun PL880 VS. PL660 - Which one is best?

Bob Negi here a b5n today I'm going to cover a couple of radios which are not typically just ham radios my radio slit hams might be interested in and the general public would be interested in and those are portable radios that cover the shortwave bands and AM and FM now a few years ago the Japanese were really hot on this because there was a lot of shortwave broadcasting around the world and Sony and Panasonic and sangeun all made great radios and that has sort of quieted down because there's a lot less a.m. broadcast going on a shortwave everything's got Internet but China is a different story they have a huge population if you a lot of medium wave and troll wave stations there and they do have a risk sale in shortwave portable radios so a companies come up into focus now called Tech's on te CSUN most hams haven't heard of it Texan wow that sounds like that was strategically chosen for the American market radios not made in Texas anyway these little receivers are quite interesting here they are is the current top of line and the previous top of the line the PLL 660 and the PL 880 by Texan both battery operated and both covered pretty much the same bands so we're going to take a quick overview of one of these things all about it could be a good value might be something you want to buy let's take a quick look at the fit and finish of these two radios here's the silver version of the pl6 60 still got the little piece of plastic over the bezel there haven't pulled it off surface silvering like this tends to wear off after a time so it looks pretty in the beginning but based treble and 10 assists sensitivity controls external antenna input on the top power adapter on the bottom headphones tuning knob vfo adjustment on the side and volume there has the four double-a battery compartment here slides off and both have the pop-out stand in the back which is nice the PL 660 case is a soft vinyl thing with a Velcro on the front of a padded case not too bad the 880 is a polished piece of equipment they really put a lot of effort into the cosmetics and fit and finish tuning knobs are much superior a little bit of silicone in them so they're nice and smooth display is very very similar connections on the side are also very similar except for the lack of a bass and treble control it does have a line out with adjustable level and the rear is similar with the pop-out stand which is nice and the battery compartment for the one lipo battery the PL 880 comes with a fake brown leather case quite nice a little cotton velvet on the inside or poly quick cheat sheet in Chinese but really looks nice with the radio in it here's a comparison of FM broadcast sensitivity your email address and this piece will blow your mind that's amazing yeah did you just it - it's simple it's one page and if you see it you and when you understand this you're gonna understand something that the vast majority of Americans absolutely do not understand and it will drive home to you the importance of just like Riskalyze I've got a interject here that one of the things that just absolutely frustrates the dog out of me about the way we do retirement is the whole process of signing up for your 401k basically goes like this I I like this is a station 250 miles away here's a comparison of a shortwave station middle of the day moderate signal strength on 15.7 megahertz having exam to select all those pods to fill out that your plasma information and your ticket will be automatically produced out but I don't know about a foreigners know the machine won't work for foreigners because you insert your Chinese ID card in energy when you play I just need to touch in deep fade there he comes yeah that system will not work with a foreign passport which means you will need to if there's a person or preferably a train station but it is important that we do no doubt that there are train stations located cool Beijing yes and say for example you're traveling from beijing west station that doesn't mean you can go to any of you you collect your ticket oh now I know the last time I was very inconvenient so when it comes to Airlines so we're moving away from trains to airline China Eastern China southern and an airline there China the friend beside their destination the only I got a wider bandwidth that if there is a delay you can remove a narrow any public announcement system-wide but it's a painful ha are there any other option firemen no there's not not a heck of a lot of difference on this particular station I like it's no Terminal three but to be furious Chinese airspace has we're going to take a little comparison on 20 meters sideband here amateur radio headwind radios outside or a little better reception and we'll start with the 660 on 14 208 in the Wow a kivi is damn good employ the awesome here's near him I lied you can tell when I'm switching it wide why feeding two wires and an to open hey Jimmy I need great wait 30 you can't even find that on the shelves anymore to the a maybe oh great wait 30 his first Elliot yeah toreador car rich shooter from how no aha juice 20 horse ok now a bend you're straight wait 30 you know either 1 0 30 you're a little bit of wobbling in it 0:30 I want 30 W 30 weeks hey Mike louver loading on that leading edge of the words from the signal first comes in yeah real one ok 30 wait no Baba look I gave back to the 60 all right I want flaker 30 weight breaker 30 weight a whole cake nothing what I've seen is pretty Stratton bran 3019 never I thought great baked engine no they of it does she feel you near Fayette I he hollow it the right William Frick a phrase believe it or not the Hollywood frightfully this I think I'll take a look e kuu well he doesn't have a phone at for six sixty you've got a happy girl fall all y'all two meters okay fair enough until the oscillator is solid on this the only other plate put up but Abel fighting over it got hit over there at NAPA yeah it's good that way here's a testing code over here or CW let's take a listen one thing the NAD can do here is to adjust the bandwidth nice still tell that the master oscillator is smoother on the 660 because of the wider bandwidth you can hear that high frequency sort of wine still copyable though so if you're trying to choose which one of these radios might be the radio for you which one would be the right one well if you're just into AM broadcast listening on the shortwave bands there's a lot of Christian broadcasters a few international shortwave stations left either radio works just fine the 660 is a little bit more sensitive so it works a little bit better on its internal pull-up antenna but if you were to add the sort of 20-foot piece of wire that comes with this one or just a hunk of wire attached to the end of the antenna no more than about 20 feet the 880 catches up rapidly and does absolutely fine it's a very close and sensitivity on shortwave although 660 edges out as you've heard on the other side if you're listening to a single sideband and you're listening to the amateur radio broadcast on the different bands the 880 has that nasty flaw in that it has an unstable master oscillator I cannot imagine how they released it with that that was didn't have to do that but that is a problem that amateur operators listening to this receiver would probably not tolerate on the other hand if you're not a ham radio operator and you want to casually listen to a few ham broadcasts you can understand what they're saying and it's alright but there's a little nut instability in there and we would as amateurs would never accept that if you are a DX ER and you are listening to very weak stations try to pull those ones out the 60 C 660 sort of edges that 880 out a little bit and it's sink detector works really good and locks on and pulls those stations out of the mud really well so it's actually a better little DX or radio on the other hand if you were say an FM listener FM broadcast listener and you listen to a station that's 50 60 miles away and you've got trouble receiving it well if you got trouble receiving it 6 60 pulls those stations and a little bit better but not with as good an internal speaker if you had local stations and you listen to stuff that's got a pretty decent signal level and you know you can hear it the 880 is the one for you because it has a nice bass and treble range and that speaker has been vastly improved you know the cosmetics have already although this is a much slicker package when it comes down to it you're listening to the radio to hear stations and that's why I'm sort of you know given a nod to those performance features and the other thing of course is the consideration of price 150 ish 100 ish 50% higher price on this radio does about the same thing with a lack of air band on the 880 the sensitivity on the air band I didn't show it but it's not very good on the 660 so you have to be sort of close to the airport to be hearing things on this on air band the memories you've got a ton of memories more than you'll ever need in either radio the features of automatically programming them also working either radio well probably similar processors inside and the hidden features that we find on the 880 you can look up by holding certain buttons down were pretty much things that they didn't really work out fully and didn't put in the manual because they really don't work well like their sync detector and this not very good to lock on AM stations dynamic digital noise reduction not really any help a few of the other hidden features adjusting the line level output and things like that or a little helps so much slicker package but when it comes down to it I don't know this also I did mention has the bass treble switch on it the 880 on the other side so we've got this on opposite sides on these two radios no biggie right there and auto light adjustments on the top left here as well top right to you so if it's for my buck 662 thumbs up I'm going to give the 881 thumb up but 50 bucks more and I like the DX and I like to listen to really weak FM stations AM broadcast is equally bad on both of these they're not superb radio so if you're going to do that add a little loop antenna you can buy and put it next to the radio and it will ill pull in the AM stations that knot a little bit better but I'm going to have to give the nod to the pl 660 by Texan now several years old well you can get a deal but 85 bucks used on this so if you have need of a little nice little you know portal radio and who doesn't yay until next time take care

Channel: Robert Nagy

Views: 139,591

Rating: 4.9212766 out of 5

Keywords: Tecsun, PL880, PL660, PL-660, PL-880, Shortwave

Id: rJL3Q_3vI1M

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 26 2016