Tecsun PL-330 Portable Radio Review

Tecsun released their latest PL-330 portable DSP receiver this summer. I acquired a Chinese version last week for $73.

The good,

• It is compact (139 x 85 x 26 mm) and lightweight (~220g).
• The build quality is good.
• I like the completely flat front surface.
  
• It supports AM synchronous detection and single side band demodulation.
• The easy tuning mode (ETM) has been improved to store shortwave results by clock time.
• You can sort the memory by frequency by long pressing the 0 button when powered off.
• It supports direct frequency entry.
• FM reception is very good.
• The power button is at the correct place and large enough.
• Tecsun finally introduced a tuning step button instead of relying on the user to rotation the tuning knob slowly for fine tuning.
• AM band has three bandwidths, 2.5, 3.5, and 9 kHz.
• AM SSB mode has 0.5, 1.2, 2.2, 3.0, 4.0 kHz bandwidths.
• The digital volume control allows different volume for alarms.
• It supports both 70 us and 50 us FM de-emphasis time constants.
  

The not so good,

• No air band support.
  
• I am not a fan of the tuning and volume knobs. I prefer the style on PL-380.
• MW and SW reception is average.
  
• No FM RDS although its DSP chip supports RDS decoding.
• Synchronous detection does not work well.
• The USB port is micro USB, not type C.
• No 6 kHz bandwidth for AM. 9kHz is too wide to be useful.
• Supports only one alarm clock.
• The snooze button is too small to be useful.
• LCD vertical view angle is small (less than ~90 degrees).
  

The bad,

• It uses the BL-5C lithium battery instead of two/three AA batteries. BL-5C holds less charge than two AA batteries. And it is hard to find good quality BL-5C batteries.
  
• An SSB reverse fine tuning bug was reported by Pawel Kita. (I did not verify.)
  
• It is difficult to operate in darkness. The buttons have a very short travel. The nine buttons on the right are too small. And the "5" button does not have a bump.
• It mutes very briefly while tuning like other DSP radios.
  

I also took it apart for some pictures. There is a connector hidden under the LCD. I guess it is for firmware update.

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In conclusion, PL-330 is worth the ~$70 price. I hope Tecsun fix the small bug in the next firmware release. If you want air and NOAA weather bands, I would recommend CC Skywave SSB.