Eton Grundig FR 300 Review

I bought the ETON FR 300 emergency radio, which has some kind of tie-in with the American Red Cross. The Red Cross on the knob of the radio should have been enough to warn me. It is also sold as an Eton-Grundig radio. So, there is some private labeling going on. This radio covers AM/FM, TV audio, and NOAA Weather radio. The WX "Alert" function will sound a voice alert for ALL counties and ALL alerts being broadcast by the NOAA station you are tuned to. I have expressed my lack of enthusiasm for this type of alert function in the Weather Radio Update 2006. I bought this radio because it has a hand-crank generator that charges a Ni-MH battery pack to run in an emergency. Also, it will charge cell phones via the hand crank - and provides an ample supply of cell-phone adapters. It can also be powered by 3-AA batteries or an AC wall adapter.

The radio has a flashing red LED strobe and a siren. What these are for is open to serious debate. To help find you under a pile of rubble or stranded in your attic by high water? If you say so.

This particular ETON FR 300 does not pick up any stations on the FM band, even though every cheap radio in my house, including battery-operated ones and free promotional radios, pick up several FM stations. Not exactly. The FM stations come in when the switch is set to TV1, which is supposed to pick up TV1 audio from Channels 2-6. And the FM stations do not come in anywhere near their numerical locations on the dial. On TV2, the tuning is from Channel 7-13. I have to go into the front yard to get an audio signal from TV Channels 10 and 12, although these stations "pin the needle" from two stations in Oklahoma on my desktop radio by CCrane. The WX portion does pick up both NOAA stations that I am tuned to on my RS 12-262 and WR-300.

The knobs feel flimsy. The whole radio has the look and feel of a child's toy. Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal called this radio "sturdy looking." Walter, did you ever pick the thing up and twist the knobs? It weighs 1.25 lbs.! Where's the beef? I am afraid to look inside. I might faint from shock. And, as noted on my sample, FM comes in on the TV1 band, and on the wrong dial settings. This one is going back and I will not accept a replacement. There is good Chinese stuff and Chinese junk. I rate this radio near the bottom of that scale.

The radio is sometimes listed as an Eton Grundig FR 300. Grundig was once a proud and venerated German maker of fine radios. The FR 300 Eton Grundig is made in China, by Tecsun/Eton. The Chinese are hoping that people will think it is a high-quality Grundig made in Germany. All I know is that it is a sad day when the Grundig name is associated with the ETON FR 300 and with Tescun/Eton. If you do a Google search on Tescun/Eton, there are a lot of entries with the words "cheap junk." Many of those by the same person - but there is still enough variety to get the message across.

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Richard Rhodes