At Home With the CCRadio-SW From C. Crane

The radio I use for shortwave listening is a CCRadio-SW from The C.Crane Company. Unlike many of the other C.Crane radios, the CCRadio-SW is not an original design, but a rebadged Redsun RP2100.  It was also sold as a Kaito KA-2100 before C.Crane bought the exclusive US distribution rights.  

The Good

Before purchasing it, I did a lot of research on radios in that price range and found it to be the best bang for the buck.  It has excellent selectivity and sensitivity, and a great digital PLL tuner. The controls are easy and intuitive to use.  The backlighted buttons are easy to read, as is the LCD display.

For Shortwave, the Narrow and Wide band settings are really helpful in tracking a SW signal down, and the 1 Khz Slow tuning option is fantastic for fine tuning.  It offers continual tuning from 1711 Khz to 30000 Khz, so it picks up a lot more than just the AM/FM/SW bands. You can get several utility and amateur bands as well as all of the CB channels. 

AM reception is great.  Unlike the previous incarnations of Kaito and Redsun, the CCRadio-SW includes the patented C. Crane Twin-Coil Ferrite antenna for greater AM power. True, it's not as big as the ones found in the CCRadio-2, but it's still a lot better than the regular ferrite antenna found in most other radios.  I have no problems picking up 780AM KOH out of Reno, NV which is about 600 miles away and on the other side of the Cascades.

FM is decent, especially with the large whip antenna.

Battery life is terrific.  I've got about 100 hours on the same set of Walgreen's brand D alkalines and they're still going strong.  It's just now starting to fall on the last notch of the battery meter.  One of the great things about the CCRadio-SW is that it can take 4 D, or 4 AA size batteries to run it, and if you're into the whole rechargeable battery thing, the radio will actually recharge them for you when it's plugged in with the included AC adapter. 

The Bad

With all this, you'd think it would be the perfect radio, and for a mere $150 or so, right?  Well, like there's no perfect antenna, there's no perfect radio and while I find the drawbacks to the CCRadio-SW to be small, they might be a deal breaker for others.

First, the speaker is good, but not so good for music.  I'm always using earbuds with it, so it's not that big of a deal to me.  The earbuds sound great, and the FM stereo sound as rich as any other I've heard. If you're looking at it for an FM receiver for music through the speaker, you'll probably be disappointed.  If you want it mainly for SW or AM, it's probably not going to be that big of a deal to you.

Secondly, it has no SSB.  When I bought it, I didn't care that much about SSB, so it wasn't on my radar.  As time goes on, I'm looking at getting a radio with SSB.  Does it make it a bad radio?  Not by any means.  It does make it a deal breaker for some people though. Even without SSB, I'd still buy it today, because as far as I can tell, there's no competetive radio with SSB in the $150 price range.  The next nearest competetive radio, and the one I'm looking at for down the road is the Grunding Satellit 750 at nearly twice the price as the CCRadio-SW.

The Antenna

I live in an apartment with windows that face a public area, so I'm unable to run any kind of an outdoor antenna.  Like a lot of listeners in my same situation, I've rigged a Slinky up as a longwire antenna.  It's a simple but effective setup.  I stretched a regular toy metal Slinky about 10 feet long, hung it from my ceiling in front of  a window, and ran a coax from one end of it to the external antenna input on the radio. Since the Slinky will droop all the way to the floor, some people run twine or cord down through it to keep it supported.  I've found it's just as effective and much easier to attach the center section to the ceiling.  This is a very cheap (under $10), easy to construct antenna and it's quite effective.  A regular Slinky is about 67 feet of wire, and running it this way creates a type of Helical antenna. 

You can get fancy with it.  A lot of people attach wood dowels or PVC pipe to the ends and have eyebolt screws so they run string from it to attach it to walls.  This may look a bit nicer, but I think it just adds to the cost and the time to construct one.  All I've done is taken some duct tape, made 3 inch long tabs on each end of the slinky, and then used thumb tacks to attach the tabs to the walls.  I did the exact same thing with the middle support tab.

I live in the Great Pacific Northwest, and I haven't gotten any European stations with this setup, but that's not unusual.  Anything from Europe is coming across the Atlantic, the Rockies and then the Cascades to get to me.  However, I do get Caribbean, North American, Asian, Australian, and even some South American and South Pacific stations fairly regularly.   Just look through the listening logs here to see.