Emergency Digital Weather Radio With AM/FM/NOAA/SW - 5000 SOS Survival Portable Radio, 5-Way Powered Solar Hand Crank With USB Charger, Flashlight, Reading Lamp, Headphone Jack for Outdoor

After reflection, I've increased my rating of this Emergency radio from 2 to 4 stars. I did that after trying to come up with my checklist of what makes for a perfect emergency weather radio. The Mesqool CR 1009 Pro checks a lot of the feature boxes, despite its shortcomings, detailed in the review below. Here are some of the boxes checked: 1. It can act as a power pack to charge other devices, and this does not rely on turning the crank. 2. The built-in rechargeable battery (2170 Lithium ion) can be replaced by the user. 3. The battery is high capacity, advertised at 5000 mAh. 4. It has shortwave in addition to AM/FM. Frequency display is digital. 5. It has weather alert notifications 6. It is weather resistant (it's remarkable how many weather/camping/emergency radios aren't) to the IPX3 standard. That's far from the highest standard, but it's something. IPX5 is preferred. 7. It has a clock 8. It has a battery charge level display. 9. It has a very bright flashlight and a reading light 10. It can use disposable batteries (AA or AAA) if necessary 11. Under $50 12. Backlighted digital display 13. Easy to carry: handle or strap. 14. Earphone jack Most of my negative opinions of this product tie to the radio implementation. AM reception. The radio is tuned with an up and a down button that goes from frequency to frequency. When tuning up, most AM stations are not received, but when tuning down they are. So if you want a particular station, you have to tune past it and then come back. It's inconsistent. This behavior is so incredibly bizarre that I returned the radio as defective and got a replacement; the replacement does exactly the same thing. If I actually intended to use the AM radio, I would consider this not acceptable. The audio is a bit distorted also. It gets zero stars for AM. With that said many portable radios have crummy AM performance. Tuning in general is very inconvenient. On any decent shortwave radio there is a band switch, either mechanical or a button that cycles through the shortwave bands. Not this one. The only way to tune from the lowest shortwave frequency of 2.3 MHz to the highest of 23.00 MHz is go through every single frequency over 4 thousand of them, either by continually press the tuning button, or using the search feature that stops on each station found. It still still takes a very long time. This is rather senseless since at different times of the day, different frequencies are active and users would tend to switch between low and high bands; that means any serious attempt to use the radio for shortwave is simply impossible. This is purely poor software design, and could easily be fixed in firmware. It gets 2 stars for shortwave. Plus what shortwave will you get with an under 10-inch antenna? I found FM performance mediocre. Many stations had high frequency content distorted, most noticeable with speech. This was even the case when using a pair of high-quality headphones. You can certainly get the news on this radio, but you probably wouldn't choose to listen to it for an extended period of time, and not for music on some stations. The user really should study the manual before using weather alerts. There are two distinct weather alert functions "Manual" and "Standby." In manual mode the radio scans all 7 weather channels for alerts and the user can set how long the radio will scan the bands, from 4 to 24 hours or always on. According to the manual, the internal battery can only support manual weather alert for 65 hours. That means that you have charge the battery about every 3 days. The battery drain for the alert function seems extreme and I would expect a 5000 mAh 2170 lithium ion to last longer. There is also a standby mode where the radio will receive alerts on a single channel you set. In this case the battery will last for 100 hours. The manual also says that when the li-ion battery gets weak, the radio will switch to the auxiliary removeable batteries; however, you cannot put batteries in the unit when the li-ion battery is significantly depleted. It will not switch (I guess one could turn the crank to get a little charge). The manual says that you shouldn't expect to charge the battery with the solar panel, but only maintain it; however, when I put the radio in a sunny window in Manual Weather Alert mode, the battery was fully depleted in under a month. It might work if you left the radio outdoors in full sun, but I was disappointed that I'm going to have to manually charge the radio in normal use just to use weather alerts. I remember weather alert radios I got from Radio Shack 30 years ago that ran for a year on a battery. If you keep the battery charged, this radio will receive and notify you of weather alerts; however, for some reason in the middle of a weather broadcast, the volume will suddenly drop to barely audible, and then go back to normal. I assume my radio is defective, but I'm not sure. This covers why I consider the radio poor for normal use. It's just a crummy radio, inexplicably crummy given the state of the art. But as an emergency radio it makes a lot of sense. FM isn't so broad a tuning range, so the tuning system including scan tuning is usable, and there are only 7 weather channels, making the buttons OK. The flashlight and reading light are incredibly bright, more like a tactical flashlight than an afterthought in a radio, and and I really like the fact that it uses an 2170 rechargeable battery (surprisingly not an 18650), one that's powerful and non-proprietary. In some emergency radios the internal rechargeable battery is an afterthought, and one relies on replaceable batteries for actual use. This one is the reverse; the good battery is built in. I doubt that I'll ever put in the optional AAA batteries. It has solar charging, crank charging and USB charging (cable included). So of all the radios I have, this is the first one I'd want in an emergency, and the last one I'd want for day-to-day radio listening -- especially shortwave.

It is easy to crank and stores energy quickly. I’m very happy with it!

Item as described

Everyone should own one of these

Smaller than expected. But otherwise great