Kaito 1102 MW/FM/SW portable radio review

 

The Kaito 1102 is a compact, digitally tuned, dual conversion MW/FM/SW portable radio, that provides excellent signal reception and an unusually full set of features for its size & price.

I bought the Kaito 1102 as part of my seemingly endless quest to find the ideal compact portable radio.  I’ve found the radio to be surprisingly good, and think it provides the best signal reception for its size – on all bands – of any radio I’ve tried!  Its bigger brother, the 1103 (I have the Degen brand 1103), provides slightly better reception, however, it is a slightly larger radio, and draws more current from its batteries.  (Note – I’m not saying that you should run out and buy the 1103 since there have been reports of some quality control problems early in their manufacture.  I needed to send mine away for a repair.)

On the Medium Wave band (“MW” – also known as the “AM” band or “Broadcast” band), sensitivity is excellent – particularly considering the compact size of the radio and the limit this places on the length of its internal ferrite bar antenna.   There is a choice of wide or narrow selectivity, so you can choose whether to optimize rejection of adjacent interfering signals (narrow selectivity) or the clarity of a signal not plagued by nearby interference (wide selectivity).  The noise floor is impressively quiet, especially for a digitally tuned receiver.  The most significant glitch I’ve found in the MW band is a strong spurious signal (generated by some circuitry inside the 1102 itself) which occurs approximately at harmonics of 270 KHz.  Given the 10 KHz channel spacing (in the U.S.), this means that one out of every 27 channels would be stepped on by this signal; overall, that’s not too bad, and leaves the radio capable of providing excellent reception on almost all of the channels in the band.  Note – the “Kaito” brand of the 1102 includes the extended upper end of the MW band (1610 – 1710 KHz), which, I gather, is not covered by the Degen brand 1102 radio.

Reception on FM is also very good.  You’ll probably want to use the bass boost option when listening to music on FM, since it significantly improves the tonal balance of the radio’s compact speaker. Without the bass boost, the sound seems thin and deficient when listening to music.  With the boost, the speaker’s range is still quite limited, of course, but, with the improved balance, music is more listen-able.

Due to the way the controls are designed, the bass boost is only available on FM.  There’s no inherent reason why it couldn’t be available on other bands too, however, the approach taken eliminates the need for an additional button.

When listening to headphones, the bass boost option is still available (on FM), however, you probably won’t need it (unless the headphones are deficient) because the sound quality from the headphone output is excellent!  Also, the audio amplifier’s noise level is quite low, so there’s barely any of that low level hiss that can be annoying on some radios when listening at low volume levels.

Selectivity on FM is quite good.  It is wide enough that you can de-tune the radio by .05 MHz to maximize the rejection of an adjacent interfering signal without significantly distorting the signal you want to listen to.  And it’s narrow enough to have almost fully rejected a signal once you’re detuned by .2 MHz (i.e. tuned to an adjacent channel).  Ideally, the filter should have “steeper skirts” and have rejected the signal completely once detuned by .2 MHz, nevertheless, the 1102 does pretty well.

On Shortwave, the sensitivity is, excellent.  For selectivity, you have the choice of the wide or narrow bandwidths mentioned earlier (for MW).  The 1102 is a dual-conversion receiver (unusual in a radio this compact), which is definitely a feature worth having if you’re going to do any serious listening on the shortwave frequencies.  The shorter the wavelength, the higher the frequency; and at high frequencies, a single-conversion receiver is not likely to provide good “image rejection”.  (An “image” occurs if you can pick up a given station at two different points on the dial, even though the transmitter is broadcasting on only one frequency!)  Also, for serious shortwave listening, the fact that this radio is digitally tuned is advantageous because the radio’s tuning is very stable – frequency drift should be almost insignificant, whereas it can be a significant problem with low cost analog-tuned shortwave radios.  AND, the 1102 can receive single sideband (SSB) transmissions, which are commonly used on shortwave bands for long range voice communication (this feature is also uncommon on radios this compact).

The 1102 has a number of good features that are not widely available.

The display *and* the buttons on the front panel are backlit, to support operating the radio in the dark.  Clearly, this is easier to use than a radio in which only the display is backlit.

Rechargeable batteries are included with the radio, and the radio is designed to be able to recharge the batteries without removing them from the radio.  Note – it’s up to the user to set the number of hours to apply the charging current.  For the batteries provided, 7 hours of charging is recommended.  If you were to replace them with higher capacity batteries, a longer charging period would be needed.  One way that you can tell when the batteries are fully charged is that the battery compartment area gets just a little bit warmer after the batteries are fully charged!  This makes sense, actually…   While the batteries are low, the charging current drives the chemical reaction that recharges the battery.  Once fully charged, that reaction has no place left to go, so the battery instead behaves like a big fat resistor and dissipates the charging current as heat (not a lot, but just enough that it can be noticed).

You can use the radio as an alarm clock; it can wake you either with a good loud beep or it can turn itself on as a radio (I’ll call this mode “radio-alarm”).  In the latter case, the settings for the radio-alarm are completely independent of the band, frequency, and volume settings that were used the last time the radio was on.  For example, if you wanted to, you could fall asleep with the radio set quietly to a MW talk station, and wake up to an FM music station playing more loudly.

Note – the radio has a digitally controlled volume level that uses “+” and “-“ pushbuttons to make the volume louder or quieter.  (This makes it possible to make the radio-alarm volume programmable.)   I still have some preference for using an actual knob to control the volume, since one can react more quickly that way than with the pushbuttons (i.e. when tuning around from station to station).  However, the pushbutton approach works pretty well, and I find that I don’t really mind that it works that way.

The radio claims to have a “line” output, however, it’s really a headphone output (and the headphone symbol appears right next to it).  The speaker is cut off if headphones are plugged in, and the radio’s volume setting controls the volume in the headphones (neither of these would apply to a true line-level output).

In some respects, I think the operation of the 1102 is not quite as intuitive as it could be.  I get the impression that the designers got just a little too much mileage out of the limited number of buttons used to control the radio.  One of the buttons will let you do something different depending on whether you press it once, twice, or even three times in a row.  The result is an interface that’s not quite as intuitively obvious as what you might find on a larger radio that has room for all the controls that it really should have in order for each control to have a clearly understandable purpose.  So it’s a compromise that allows the size and cost of the radio to be minimized.  So long as you keep the instruction manual handy while you’re learning how to use the radio, the usefulness of all the built-in features should make the learning curve worth while.

Overall, what impresses me about the 1102 is the high ratio it achieves of (features & performance) / (cubic inch)!  So, I think this model is particularly worth looking at if compact size is important to you.  Actually, its reception performance competes well even with larger radios, so compactness needn’t be the only reason for choosing this model; but if it is an issue, then definitely check out the 1102.

Having briefly mentioned the Kaito 1103 earlier, I think it might be worth mentioning that, according to some interesting rumors, the 1103’s receiver design may have been incorporated into the recently released Grundig G5 / Eton E5 models, and that these new models have a much improved control layout compared to the 1103.  Since this transfer of ownership presumably resolves the manufacturing quality control problems I touched on at the beginning, these new models may be worth a look!  On the assumption that the performance of these models may be similar to that of my (repaired) 1103, they could offer slightly better sensitivity, selectivity, noise floor, and better speaker tone quality than the 1102.  However, they would also be larger, heavier, more expensive, and chew up batteries faster than the 1102, putting them into a somewhat different category than the 1102.  As an owner of both the 1102 and 1103, my 1102 gets plenty of use thanks to its convenience, good battery life and very good signal reception. The 1102 doesn’t quite push the envelope in terms of signal reception, but it’s very good in that department, and it’s a very practical and useful radio overall.  If you buy one, I doubt very much that it will just sit around and collect dust!




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