KA390 Portable AM/FM Shortwave NOAA Weather Radio with LED Flashlight, Color Black

I bought the Kaito KA390 Portable AM/FM Shortwave Radio for our household to use as an emergency radio for disaster preparation. It uses 4 “D” batteries. The radio reception on all radio bands are excellent. It is not overly large in size, but it is not a pocket-size radio, either. It is a great portable radio for taking to the beach, to a vacation destination, to the park, or to a sporting event. It is a reliable radio, with great sound coming out from the speaker. I highly recommend that you buy it for your family, for yourself, or as a gift to someone.

I bought this with a 12-pack of D batteries. I started using it around the start of May, the first set of batteries (the first 3 batteries I used) lasted until the end of October. Six months of use with one set of batteries! I use the radio about 4-5 days a week, for about 2-3 hours per day. Sometimes I use it only ~1h per day. Sometimes I leave it on all day on the weekends. It has been a good little radio.

I like

The negative reviews on this radio puzzle me. It's a cheap portable radio. It's designed for low cost, portability and excellent battery life - and it scores 10/10 on all three. Sound quality is really very good for a monaural radio - more than satisfactory for me - and even though it has analog tuning, I find it easy to surf the bands looking for stations. In fact, I bought an extra one for a blind friend of mine precisely because the radio is so simple to use with few controls and no mysteries. If I had a criticism, it would be that the radio's way of snapping into signal reception on the AM and shortwave bands is a bit abrupt, making it difficult to receive weak stations. This would not be my first choice for a shortwave radio. For strong AM and FM station reception (and even medium-strength stations), I think it's excellent, and having weather radio frequency reception on a low-end analog radio such as this is an excellent bonus. Don't buy it as your primary radio, but use it in power failures, for camping, for travel, and anywhere that you don't want to risk your expensive radio and yet want flexibile capability. I would buy another again in a heartbeat if mine disappeared.

Solid FM performance and build quality is good.