About 3 years ago I reviewed a really great AM radio from a company named C.Crane. This radio, the CCRadio plus, sported the best AM reception in a radio its size. Now 3 years later C.Crane comes out with the next generation CCRadio called the CCRadio-SW. The CCRadio-SW gets rid of some features and adds others. The main addition is a Shortwave receiver.
Features
- AM/FM/Short Wave
- Built-in Twin Coil Ferrite™ AM Antenna
- Large LED Display
- Radio/Tone Alarm
- Timer
- 50-memory preset buttons (with 10 memories per band)
The addition of a Shortwave receiver is great. Shortwave is good for long distance communication, if the conditions are correct and the signal is strong enough, you can hear stations from thousands of miles away.
The built-in Twin Coil Ferrite™ AM Antenna gives this radio excellent AM reception. Like the other CCRadios this radio can often pick up stations that other radios cannot get.
The large LED display is really great for viewing the display information. You get a lot of information also. The display shows the time, battery status frequency, band and much more.
Design
Being that this is a radio there is not much to the design. It comes in only one color, black. It is a simple rectangle with a lot of the same features as a normal radio. On the front is where you will find most of the buttons and knobs that you need to make this radio work.
Front
The left side of the front is dominated by a single 5″ speaker that has been specifically tuned to human voice, which is great for the AM and Shortwave stations; the FM sounds good on the speaker also. Under the speaker is a headphone jack, AM RF Gain, Treble and Bass knobs.
On the right side of the front, starting at the top, is a large by radio standards, LED screen, and three buttons to the right of the screen. The three buttons are Power/Sleep, Dual Time/W/L and Lock. The power button obviously turns on the radio and when it turns on, if you quickly press the button again, you will activate the sleep function. The sleep function will shut off the radio after a certain time that you set. The time that you set will be saved even if you turn off the radio. Dual time and W/L do the same thing, they show local time and world time. The lock turns off the keys so you cannot turn on or off the radio, change the station, or push any other buttons. I did find that volume, AM RF Gain, Treble, Bass and all switches on the sides still work.
Local Time
World Time
The bottom section of the right side of the front has many more knobs and buttons for you to play with. On the left side you have two knobs for switching between bands. The top one switches between Wide and Narrow AM/SW and Mono Stereo FM. The next knob is for switching between AM, SW1, SW2 and SW3. Below those two knobs is the volume. To the right of those knobs is a big knob that is used for tuning. Above the tuning knob are 3 buttons that affect the tuning knob. Hold makes it so the knob does not change the station, however you can still change the station using the up and down arrows that I will talk about in a bit. The slow and fast buttons determine how fast the stations change as you turn the knob.
To the right of the tuner knob are 8 more buttons and each of these buttons have multiple functions; the label that is above the key is the function when the radio is off and the label on the key is for when the radio is on. Starting with the top two they are Minute/Down and Hour/Up, Minute and Hour are used to adjust the time and up and down are for adjusting the tuner. Then there is Clock Set/Mem Set and Alarm Type/Alarm, Clock Set turns on the clock adjustment and then you use the Minute and Hour to change the time. Mem Set saves the current station in one of the memory slots, you can choose which slot by using the up and down arrows, and Alarm is for turning the alarm on and off and changing the alarm sound from radio to beeping. The next two are timers which will turn the radio on at certain times, you have the ability to set two timers. To set the time the radio must be off and you hold down one of the timer buttons then use the minute and hour buttons to adjust the time, then you press the alarm button to turn it on and choose the sound. The last two are SW Band and Charge/Memory, SW Band switches between the common Shortwave frequencies for each Shortwave band. If you are in AM mode then the SW Band button will just step up by 100 kHz and in FM it will step up by 1000 kHz each time you press it. Charge starts the battery charging and Memory loads each of the saves stations. The charge button is only useful if you have rechargeable batteries. Be very careful that you do not turn this on unless you have rechargeable batteries installed because it may cause other batteries to burst and that will ruin your radio.
Clock
FM Station
AM Station
On the back is the battery compartment. Unlike most other radios you can use either 4 AA batteries or 4 D batteries. There is a switch on the left side that switches between the two. Inside the battery compartment is the AM tuning step switch that will tell the radio how many steps to skip when you tune. You should use 10k in the US and 9k if you are in Europe or other countries. Also, on the back is the external AM and FM antenna connectors. In case the internal AM or FM antennas are not good enough for your location, you can use an external AM or FM antenna.
Back
Back Battery
Batteries
There are two large black buttons on the top which are used to turn on the snooze and the display light. There is another feature for the snooze button, if you hold down the snooze button for about two seconds when there is not an alarm going you activate a beep that will sound every time you press a button, pressing the button again will disable the beep. I don’t know the purpose except to provide feedback to pressing the buttons and to annoy everyone around you. Also, on the top is a telescoping antenna for FM and Shortwave radio. Above the snooze and light buttons is a small key that lists the bands that you can listen to and the frequencies that each band can receive. For example, it lists FM and under that it shows 87.5 – 108.0 MHz, AM is 520 – 1710 kHz, SW1 is 1711 – 10010 kHz, SW2 is 9990 – 20010 kHz and SW3 is 19990 – 29999 kHz. This is good for knowing what you can expect from the different bands. There is also a timezone map next to the frequency key.
Top
On the right side are three switches, Key light which toggles the lights on and off the keys, AM Sens tells the internal antenna if the radio station is far away, if it is far away, then you set this switch to Distant, if not, you set it to local. I had to try both before I found the one that worked best for me. The last switch is FM/SW antenna, this switch tells the radio if you are using an external or the internal whip antenna to receive FM and Shortwave radio stations.
Right
On the left is a Line Out without volume control for hooking the CCRadio-SW to a stereo or recorder. Below that is a switch that tells the radio what kind of batteries you are using. Last, there is a DC plug for plugging it into a wall with the included adapter.
Left
If you are upgrading from the CCRadio Plus you should do a through comparison of the features of both radios before you buy this one because the CCRadio-SW is missing several features that the CCRadio Plus has. For example, it does not have the weather or TV stations.
Performance
Setting up the radio is just as easy as setting up the clock radio on your night stand. All you do is press the clock set button and press the hour and minute buttons to adjust the time, then press the clock set button again to start the clock. You do not have to set the clock to listen to the radio, but if you want to use the alarm then it is a must. Assigning radio stations is a cinch, all you have to do is press the MEM/SET button and then use the up and down arrows to choose one of the 10 available memory slots and then press MEM/SET again to lock it in. Setting up the alarm and timer is just as easy as setting up the clock. Instead of pressing the clock set button just use the timer a or b button and follow the same steps to adjust the time. Then you use the alarm button to turn on the alarm and set the sound.
I am not a big Shortwave user so playing with this radio’s Shortwave feature was a new experience for me. I was initially disappointed by the lack of interesting programming, but once I found the correct times and stations to listen to I was able to find some good programs. I did notice that most of the programming I found were religious or Spanish speaking. I was really hoping to tune into some French, German or British broadcasts, but either I was listening at the wrong time or I live in the wrong area, but I could not find any. One odd behavior I noticed was that when I was holding down the scan button it would sometimes skip large ranges of numbers. For example, it skipped from 6300 to 7100 and 7500 to 9400. It would happen even if I was going backwards or forwards through the numbers. If I turned the dial on the front it did not skip numbers.
The biggest test as far as performance goes is the AM reception. C.Crane says that this radio has a built-in Twin Coil Ferrite AM Antenna. So I put it to the test. Since this radio will most likely be used indoors in an office setting that is where I tested it. I also tested a CCRadio plus to see if one is better then the other. Both radios were not able to pick up anything but static inside my office, when I put it next to a window they both got perfect reception. When hooking them up to an external Twin Coil Ferrite AM Antenna I got good reception with both radios, not as good as it was when they were near the window, but good enough to listen to. The only annoyance about the CCRadio-SW was that I could not use the Ferrite stick. No matter where I placed it on the CCRadio-SW it would not improve the reception. So I had to use the external antenna connectors on the back and it immediately improved the reception. With a little adjustment on the antenna I was able to get clear reception for the radio. The one thing that caused me the most static was noise in the power line. If you have a lot of devices using the same power you can get noise in the power lines. Every time I pluged in my Treo 650 the static was so bad that I could hardly hear the radio. I tried plugging the Treo into other outlets, but as long as the outlets were on the same circuit it still effected the reception. Power noise was a problem for both radios. It would be nice if the radios had some power conditioning built-in, but since they don’t you could purchase a power strip with power conditioning to take noise out of the power line. Noise in the power line only seemed to affect the AM reception.
Battery life on the CCRadio-SW is really good, the claim for this radio is about 30 hours on AA batteries and 175 hours for D batteries. These times will vary because battery life can be affected by several factors. To make sure you get the most from your batteries, keep the button lights off and the volume down.
The sleep timer is nice if you use the radio to go to sleep with, but it got in my way on several different occasions. Because it is built into the power button you cannot turn the radio on and off rapidly. There were a couple of times when I would turn on the radio and a co-worker would come over to talk to me and I would go to turn it off and instead it would activate the sleep timer. I had to learn to just turn down the volume instead of turning it off.
Warranty and Support
The CCRadio-SW comes with a one year parts and labor warranty. It is a short warranty and I wish it were longer.
Conclusion
If you are in the market for a great radio with lots of great features and excellent battery life then the CCRadio-SW is an excellent choice. The CCRadio-SW is currently cheaper than the CCRadio plus, so if you don’t need TV or weather bands then you will get a great radio for less. You can find the CCRadio-SW for $149 on the C.Crane website. I highly recommend that you check it out. The CCRadio-SW can be purchased directly from C.Crane or Amazon
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A fair review, highlighting features that are important to most casual consumers, who certainly make up the bulk of the purchasers of any radio these days. These days I can’t fault anyone doing radio reviews for not having $10,000 worth of test equipment and using it to create pages of test data. I have been designing, building, using and repairing just about any sort of radio imaginable for over 40 years. I can offer a few suggestions for tests that I have developed since I no longer have access to a van full of test gear as I did when I was a working technician for a communications service company.
Some items are important to a serious radio hobbyist, which can be hard to define. This radio is familiar to me, as it appears to be a new version of a radio made by a Chinese company that had been making short wave radios, but had not ventured into this level of quality and features. I could be wrong, but visually it looks the same. The choice of AA or D batteries is a feature I have never seen from any other manufacturer. I made a fairly extensive study of it and opinions of the workmanship I found were positive. Chinese companies in general can make fine quality products if the company contracting for the production asks for better quality for a higher price, allowing more time for tuning and quality control. I have seen Chinese electronic products made as well as the highly respected Japanese and Taiwanese manufacturers. A few features have been added or deleted on this radio, the biggest improvement is clearly the inclusion of the Twin-Coil Ferrite Antenna. Another pleasant surprise is the price. C.Crane is including a high performance antenna but is keeping the retail price very close to the prices I was seeing on the earlier model, buying on Ebay, direct from China with essentially no warranty due to the cost of sending it back for service! It is refreshing to see a company that doesn’t try to make a huge markup on a high performance specialty product like this.
A few tests that can give a good indication of a radio’s performance, without hardware. An important one is to find a strong local signal with a distant station one or two clicks away (10 to 20 Kc for techs). If the radio can get the weak station without hearing a constant howl or the audio from the stronger station bleeding through, it is exceptional. Usually you can do a few different tests like that up and down the dial in any metro area with several local stations. Try going higher or lower to see if the performance is different one one side or the other of a strong local. This will indicate that the radio is very well aligned (tuned). It should be even both directions. Selectivity is the most important feature for AM or short wave. Due to the natural noise generated by the Earth itself, people 60-70 years ago could make an am/shortwave radio quieter than the noise “floor” in the most remote wilderness. In a city environment today, the noise “floor” is much higher, so an overly sensitive radio can actually work very poorly due to overload and noise. So selectivity is the crucial feature of a really good radio. As an illustration, I have a very strong local on 980. There is a high power station 125 miles away on 1000. So a good radio should be able to tune both without any bleedover or howls. The tougher test at my location is a low powered station about 75 miles away on 970. A radio that can get both 980 and then get the station at 970 is a very fine radio. I’m sure you can find similar challenges based on your location and stations in the area.
You hit many excellent points on the nature of short wave reception. Something helpful in testing a radio can be the WWV time signal stations the government operates from Fort Collins Colorado. They have transmitters at 2.5 Mhz, 5 Mhz, 10Mhz, 15 Mhz, 20Mhz and 25 Mhz (I’m thinking one of the higher frequencies may be in Hawaii). They operate 24 hours a day with a constant tone and clicks every second. A voice announces the time each minute, and some times there are weather reports mixed in. There is also a similar one in Canada at 3.3Mhz. Fixed stations like these allow you to zero in on the times when each frequency works best. They can give you a basic idea of how accurate the digital or other frequency readout of the radio is as well.
A very nice feature for the “geekiest” of techies, is the “IF” output jack. This gives a raw signal that can be displayed on an oscilloscope to check the performance of the radio. It also allows one to run a raw signal, before any filtering that makes the sound through the speaker better through the speaker. This raw signal can be fed to a simple, cheap computer interface. With software that is usually freeware from Ham operator sites on the web, you can decode the morse code Hams use, and also the weird rushing noises and “tweeting, warbling” noises (which are teletype signals, or fax encoded signals). It takes some patience and study to get the setup right, but it is really fun to pick up these “secret” signals and watch the text and fax type pictures on your computer screen. Before satellites became the main communication pathways, these teletype signals were the main way to distribute news services worldwide. When heavy sunspots shut down the satellites temporarily, the few remaining teletype networks and shortwave voice networks have to pick up the load for short periods. Few radios under $500 have this feature.
For the ultimate weirdness, you can couple the short wave radio to an IF output on an old (big dish type) satellite receiver, then tune in things like computer data, teletypes, and telephone calls on both satellite and some earthbound microwave relays.
I’ll stop this long winded article,I’m sure you can compact the important info into a much smaller form. I hope a few points in here might help you on later reviews of short wave radios. Radio and TV long distance reception has been a lifelong obsession for me. I’m always trying to get higher, longer and better antennas along with better radios and ways to modify them for better performance. If my health allows, this spring I’ll get a 40 foot tower erected, with the 12 foot long FM antenna I built last summer and rotor – for FM broadcast DXing. I want to snag some difficult catches before HD FM radio trashes up the band completely. I also want to get a stand alone Twin Coil antenna mounted on (or in) the loft of my garage, or my garden shed, 50 feet away from the computers and house wiring. I also have a couple of 50 year old (new old stock, never used) rotors, since the twin-coil is directional it will need one. I also want to have the twin coil run to my computer room and my bedroom, with a rotor control at both places. (sorry to wander off subject).
This radio is an exceptional value at $149.95, I believe it is comparable to radios that cost twice as much. If my old, highly modified DX-398 ever dies, I think this one would be a good replacement. Thanks for doing the reviews, they are so important to shoppers but hard to find on any unusual gear.
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John,
Thank you very much for the information. I will certainly use some of it in future reviews and if I get time I may update this review.
Have you ever thought about starting a blog or writing reviews about some of the projects you work on? With your level of experience you would have a lot to contribute. The project you are planning this spring with the 40 foot tower sounds very interesting and I am sure others would love to read about it. If you ever want to take pictures and write something or just make comments I would be more than happy to host them for you.1
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Wow. Thank You very much for your comments on the Ccrane radio. Would like to see people like you with your technical expertise publish technical evaluations. There are virtually no technical reviews available of radios, audio and video equipment. I miss so much reading how the sensitivity, selectivity, frequency response, signal to noise, and other parameters compare between different equipments. People have the impression that everything has been digitized in its entirety and nothing remains in the analog domain, so there is nothing to compare and evaluate.
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Well I just had the speaker on my CCRadio-SW stop working. Actually, it still works, but I cannot hear anything because there is no sound coming out. At first, I thought it was the speaker because when I plug in headphones I could still hear the radio. However, I could only hear out of the left side of the headphones. So after playing around with the knobs and buttons I found that if I press vertically down on the volume knob then I could hear out of both sides of the headphones. So I tried this without headphones and I got sound out of the speaker. This leads me to believe that the volume knob is broken, but it also brings out a interesting fact that the speaker only plays the right channel, since the left channel still worked with headphones.
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After playing around with the volume knob some more it started working again. I can still get it to go crazy by jiggling it, but everything else about it is fine.
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I happened onto this site/forum while researching the CCRadio-SW that my father-in-law “thinks” he wants for Christmas. I wonder if anyone here could tell me if this is a good buy or a great buy. It seems that after the AM radio stations turn down their power each day that he’s unable to listen to his favorite talk shows. He’s retired and listens to them most all the time (when the signal is there). Just wondered if some of you owners/techies can elaborate on the CCRadio-SW. Thanks to all.
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Because every situation is different I always recommend that you buy, or borrow, the radio and try it out. If it is not able to pick up the radio stations, then send it back. I don’t know of any other way to determine if a radio is good for your particulare situation.
You could also look into an External AM Antenna.
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The only irritat65ing thins about this radio, which is sold
in Australia as a “digitech” (made in China), is the world time display. It assumes that the minutes of your local time is the same as the world time, so that they can’t be changed. South Australia has a non integer time zone. What this means is that if my local time is 9.20am, It cannot display GMT at 10.50pm. It can only display 23.20hrs, being the same minutes as local time. The manufacturers, should cater for the world’s non integer timezones.
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A note to Ryan on the intermittant volume control: it may be a broken solder joint on the board, the control itself may be OK (i.e.: no parts needed). My display began to fade at times, but by disturbing the front panel, it would come back. It turned out to be a visibly poor solder joint on one of the boards. If you feel confident about opening up the radio to touch up these solder joints use anti-static precautions and just enough heat to do the job. The display and ribbon cables are delicate, so handle them as little as possible. On another note, I’m interested in CW/SSB reception and am thinking of getting a TG37 adapter (see the demonstration on youtube). It sounds like it works well and plugs into the IF jack in the rear. It sits outside the radio, but I think that it could be put in an enclosure with a battery for appearance and portability. I’m very pleased with the radio overall as I retired my Sony ICF-2010. I only miss the full time clock and CW/SSB features.
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Thank you for the idea. I took apart the CCRadio to see if I could identify anything that was broken. Unfortunately, I did not find anything.
Here are some pictures of what I saw. When I took off the board that the volume knob is attached to, and looked underneath, I did not see any broken solder joints.
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Ryan, when you open the CCRadio-SW up, did you get a chance to look at the twin ferrite antenna. What size did it look like and are they two ferrites side by side, or what?
cheers
Just got mine this week and am curious, but don’t want to open it up unless I need to.
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Unfortunately no, that was not on my mind at the time so I did not pay attention to it.
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fyi
LED is light emitting diode
LCD is the display type for the CCSW
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Well, the radio would blast full volume at times and it wasn’t the solder joints. I removed the control pot from the board and gently drilled out the rivets (later replaced with thin, long screws and nuts). The control is 2 back-to-back pots. A wiper arm must have been losing contact intermittantly, so I gently sprung them out a tad and added a couple of drops of Deox-it.
The radio has behaved fine since. This is very delicate work and last ditch would have been to replace the control. The control is serviced as the complete board, so repair was attempted first.
Beware the schematics availible on the net for the Roadstar clone, it has point-to-point wiring errors. This radio is similar to the CCraneSW, but not the same radio.
The twin-coil antennas are located in the rear of the cabinet and hot-glued in place.
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Just thought I’d clarify for you and any other “new to high frequency” folks what that “reported to be strange” jumping back & forth from 7.100mhz-7.500mhz and so on actually is.
High frequency is divided up into meter bands as follows, 120m, 90m, 80m 60m, 49m, 41m, 31m, 25m, 22m, 20m, 19m, 18m, 17m, 16m, 15m, 13m, 11m and so on. For instance 7,100mhz – 7.500mhz comprises the entire 41 meter band!
Most digital portables allow you to jump to any desired individual band in any numeric order with just the touch of a single button which greatly enhances the ease of operation, yet that feature is lacking on the CC radio shortwave!
So they included a carousel button which will cascade through the bands in either direction, though won’t allow you to jump to a specific band with a single touch, thus you must carousel through the meter bands individually, though the inclusion of the carousel button still greatly enhances the ability of the receiver!
Otherwise you’d be forced to manually spin the knob, or slew up & down by button through all of the bands to reach your desired position!
I rate the CC Radio Shortwave as an excellent field type receiver, it has decent to very good sensitivity, fair selectivity enhanced greatly by a killer narrow filter coupled to the best speaker magnet in any receiver in it’s price class…Actually almost any price class!
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WHO would, After these Reviews want to spend $149.00 on a radio with ALL these faults ?????
Seems to me a no brainer… DON’T BUY IT ! Sorry, that’s just my opinion.
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Well I did wind up having to replace my volume control pot after all. The resistive coating on the control shoe had worn a spot in it that would blast full volume whenever the wiper crossed it.
The control itself is a piggybacked pair of 10K pots which was made by CTS (the recalled Toyota gas pedal company) **grin**.
This specific part was not availible but I was able to buy and make a similar pair from Mouser work. Parts for Chinese electronics are pretty much a captive market or non-existent.
Otherwise, the CCraneSW is doing very well. Good sound and sensitivity but local RF noise (broadband?) makes listening to DX annoying at times.
My old Sony ICF-2010 had cheap plastic, internal connector problems and intermittant switches. Although it was highly rated 25 years ago, it is a mediocre radio by today’s standards.
The Chinese-made Eton/Grundigs from Radio Shack have numerous little nuisance quality issues also.
I do take my radios camping and they are not considered outdoor radios. I wouldn’t call it abuse, but they aren’t pampered either.
Overall the CCraneSW experience has been good. My dad hasn’t had any problems with his, but his is strictly a bedside radio. He swears by it and listens to big band AM stations 200 miles away in Canada with good results. I would buy another. It has not been a disappointment.
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