收音机评论家杰伊·艾伦对SR-286的评价 前言：这是对一个相当单一产品的相当不寻常的评论。 Qodosen SR-286 基于 NXP TEF6686 DSP 芯片，专为汽车收音机使用而设计。 因此，它提供的性能和可调节性水平远远超出了我对便携式收音机的期望。 在某些方面，这个小收音机的功能绝对让我震惊。 从某些方面来说，这简直令人惊叹！ FM接收是奇迹。我把 SR-286 和我最好的几台五星调频便携式设备放在一起，在 Qodosen 上发现了几个电台，而这些电台在其他收音机上是没有的。由于这似乎不太可能，我不得不仔细检查自己，以确保这些不是某种虚假图像，但是小小的SR-286显示了RDS信息，证明这些是真实的电台，这些电台要么完全不存在，要么只是在所有其他收音机上发出微弱的杂音......这一事实让我感到非常惊讶。 这给我带来了一个问题——由于 SR-286 击败了我所有的五星级 FM 便携式设备，我要么不得不将它们全部降低到四星级，要么为 Qodosen 创建六星级评级。至少可以说，这些都是有趣的结果。 MW 中波性能也很有趣。 因为这是一款紧凑型收音机，内置铁氧体棒必然很小，并且铁氧体的接收效果与该尺寸的最佳收音机一致……它在 AM Mega Shootout 列表中的评级可能为 *** 至 ***1/2 。 但是，您可以选择鞭状拉杆天线而不是铁氧体棒，并且还可以启用可切换的 20 db 放大器。 如果您随后将收音机带到噪音非常低的区域（例如室外），则 AM 接收效果将变得非常出色，可与我最好的五星级参考收音机相媲美。 这里唯一的缺点是，您不具有了铁氧体磁棒天线的方向特性，因此某些信号无法通过瞄准达到峰值或为零，这在某些电台上可能是一个大问题。 但在其他方面，彻底的灵敏度和低本底噪声是惊人的，有时甚至比 *****（五星）便携式设备还要好。 这确实是非常出色的表现。 我没有机会在 LW 上测试 SR-286，但有人告诉我，它在 LW 上也很出色，并且击败了竞争对手……我没有理由怀疑这一说法。 SW 短波与 19 英寸拉杆配合使用也非常出色，但再一次，卓越的芯片让收音机在使用外部天线时真正闪耀。 它很喜欢我的 Wellbrook 环路和我尝试过的随机线天线，但没有发现在较便宜的收音机上常见的 FM 信号出现的短波频段上的现象。 唯一可惜的是没有单边带，但基本的SW接收效果不会让您失望。 结论：虽然 Qodosen 不是一款你目前可以购买的收音机，但我希望它能在某个时候上市，并且它将成为未来可能性的预兆。 我对这种级别的性能和功能集完全没有准备，这远远超出了我的想象。 我希望主要制造商之一能够意识到具有这种性能的收音机有市场。 尽管许多用户设置对于严肃的收音机爱好者来说是一个令人难以置信的工具，但我们必须记住，汽车收音机省略了所有这些神秘的设置，而是使用自动设置，以便任何可以调谐收音机的人简化操作。 在完美的世界中，我希望看到具有这种接收功能的收音机，自动模式可能会被业余爱好者覆盖或被主流用户忽略，以及全尺寸便携式收音机，其铁氧体棒足够大，可以在典型的情况下提取卓越的 AM 性能。 使用全尺寸铁氧体棒，这可能会设定调幅收音机的新标杆。
There are a few other radios available which use the TEF family of DSP chips but I don’t think any of them have built-in ferrite rods for AM/LW which is generally needed for indoor listening. More to come on that. I would expect that any radio using one of these chips would have similar performance other than for AM/LW using only the whip with no ferrite rod but I don’t know if they utilize all of the settings and features which are available the SR-286.
This is going to be a rather unusual review of a rather singular product. The Qodosen SR-286 is based on the NXP TEF6686 DSP chip which is designed for car radio use. As such it offers levels of performance and adjustability far beyond what I have come to expect of portable radios and as this report unfolds you will see how, in some ways, this little radio has absolutely astounded me with what it can do. For those of you who have read my articles over these many years you know that I refrain from hyperbole. Many online reviewers claim certain products have “blown them away” or made every other radio obsolete. I have never said anything like that and I’m not going to now, but what I will say is that this little radio is in some ways superior to every other radio I have seen. Not overall of course…that would be an absurd claim, but there are aspects of its performance that redefine what we can expect from a portable radio.
I also have to tell you that as of this writing the designer is still trying to obtain more of these chips needed to produce this radio. From what I have been told the developer has not been able to entice any of the major manufacturers to commit to the scale of production necessary to obtain this chip from NXP. A limited production run of these radios was made as an experiment but future plans are still pending. Nevertheless I think this evaluation will be of interest to those who love radios as I do because discovering that the technology exists to produce such ground-breaking performance presents hopes of improved radios overall down the road…I certainly hope this will be the beginning of a new era. Just as the DSP chips from Silicon Labs, which are used in just about every current day portable radio have matured to the point where overall performance is better than what was possible a decade or two ago, it is possible to go further with chips which offer even higher levels of performance.
Description: The Qodosen SR-286 is a compact portable measuring approximately 5” x 3” x 1 1/8”…the size of the C. Crane Skywave and smaller than the Tecsun PL-320/330. It covers AM/LW/FM/SW and has settings for the different band limits and channel spacing used around the world. It also features RDS/RBDS and runs on an 18650 Li-ion battery which can be charged via its USB Micro port. It offers a host of digital features such as World/Local clocks, Alarms and Timers, Auto Scan and Memory settings, Alpha Page Labelling, the ability to use external antennas on all bands, an Antenna Attenuator and 20 db amp…again too many to list so I invite you once again to take a look at the manual for a full listing of all of its features. Qodosen SR-296 Manual:
Performance: Here I will touch upon just some of the unusual things this radio can do. This is by no means going to cover everything…that would require a book, but after looking at the manual my description will give details on why I think this a ground-breaking development in the context of portable radios.
FM Reception is miraculous. I put the SR-286 side by side with several of my best Five Star FM portables, and found several stations on the Qodosen that were just not there on the other radios. Since this seemed unlikely I had to double check myself to be sure these were not some kind of spurious images, but the little SR-286 displayed RDS info which proved these were real stations which were either completely absent or little more than faint murmuring noises on all of the other radios….all on its 19” whip antenna. I did find it was necessary to hold the radio in my hands to get these signals because the small radio benefited from the hand capacitance/counterpoise effect. I then tried a folded dipole in place of the whip and this made the hand capacitance effect much less obvious as I had expected. But the very fact that this radio not only heard stations I couldn’t receive on any other portable but also displayed the RDS info completely amazed me.
This presented me with a problem – since the SR-286 beats all my Five Star FM portables I would either have to lower all of them to Four Stars or create a Six Star rating for the Qodosen. These are interesting results to say the least.
(Background) My car FM radio has always outperformed all of my portables. We have a Subaru Outback and a Nissan Altima and the Altima radio is far superior…I have no portables that can match it, so I took the SR-286 out to where the car was parked and the car radio was still better. It may have an even better automotive chip and it certainly has a more sophisticated antenna plus a great counterpoise (the car’s body), but still the SR-286 came closer to it than my other portables ever have. I suspect a better external antenna might close the gap as other users have suggested but I’m just guessing here.
The TEF-6686 chip has several enhancements as well such as multipath reduction, advanced blending in stereo mode, multiple bandwidths etc. How about 16 FM bandwidths including Automatic! While I consider this overkill there is no doubt that this radio will separate any receivable FM signal from any neighboring one or allow low distortion on typical signals. The Auto setting works well. There are also different FM processing settings…I found setting 1 (not the default) to be the best by a very slight margin.
AM Performance was also interesting. Because this is a compact radio the built-in ferrite rod is necessarily small and reception off the ferrite is consistent with the best radios of this size…it would rate perhaps *** to ***1/2 in the AM Mega Shootout list. However, you can select the whip antenna instead of the ferrite rod, and there is also a switchable 20 db amplifier you can enable. If you then take the radio to a very low noise area, such as outdoors, the AM reception becomes phenomenal rivalling my best Five Star reference radios. The only other limitation here is that you do not have the directional characteristics of the ferrite rod so some signals cannot be peaked or nulled by aiming which can be a big problem on some stations. But on others the downright sensitivity and low noise floor are phenomenal and sometimes even better than the ***** portables. This is truly outstanding performance. I didn’t have a chance to test the SR-286 on LW but have been advised that it is amazing on LW as well and beats the competition…I have no reason to doubt that claim.
SW is also excellent with the 19” whip but once again, the superb chip allows the radio to really shine when using external antennas. It loved my Wellbrook loop and a random wire antenna I tried with it and there was no FM breakthrough into the SW bands which we often find on less expensive radios. There is no SSB which is unfortunate but basic reception will not disappoint you.
Conclusion: Although the Qodosen is not a radio you can buy at the moment I am hoping it will become available at some point and also that it will be a harbinger of future possibilities. I was completely unprepared for this level of performance and a feature set that goes way beyond what I would have even thought to wish for. I hope that one of the major manufacturers will realize there is market for radios with such performance. And although the many user settings are an incredible tool for serious radio hobbyists we must remember that car radios omit all of these arcane settings and instead use Automatic settings for simplified operation by anyone who can tune a radio. In a perfect world I would love to see a radio with this kind of reception, automatic modes which could be overridden by hobbyists or ignored by mainstream users, and a full sized portable with a ferrite rod large enough to extract superior AM performance in a typical home setting where the whip is too noisy to be practical. With a full size ferrite rod this could possibly set new levels of AM performance.
西窗小酌
小龙