Freeplay Summit Wind-up Radio Mini-Review
For those of you who have been following along here for awhile, you’ll know that my faithful Baygen Freeplay wind-up radio died on me a few weeks ago. You’ll also know that I was having a bit of trouble trying to decide whether to replace it with either the Freeplay Summit, or the Eton FR300.
Well, the Freeplay Summit won out. In the end, I think it was probably the sexier design of the Summit coupled with the built-in solar panel feature that led me to pick it. I only received my unit in the mail last Friday and have had just a few spare moments to play with it thus far, so I’ll do a more indepth review later.
For now, in terms of my initial reaction, I like it. It’s defintitely a nicely designed unit. While compact at 6.8″ W x 3.5″ H x 3″ D, it weighs in at 1.3 lbs, making it feel really solid. Rubber bumpers on the top and bottom edges make for great gripping when using the hand crank. Speaking of the hand crank, this one is a tremendous improvement over what they had in the old Baygens. Again, it has a much more solid feel to it.
For reception, I have no major complaints. The unit has four bands - AM, FM, LW and SW coverage from 5.95-15.6MHz. The telescoping FM antenna is shorter than I was expecting and perhaps a little inadequate on its own. Thankfully, there’s a separate 7 meter long shortwave reel antenna (in a nice retractable disk compartment) that when clipped on to the FM antenna provides ample boost for quality reception. The SW reception is far from the greatest, but sufficient for a normal bloke like myself. If you’re a serious radio geek, you’d be best to look elsewhere.
As I said, one of the reasons I chose the Summit was because of the built-in solar panel, but alas, it is November in central Ontario and I haven’t seen the sun in several days. So we’ll all have to wait and see how that little feature works at a later time.
All in all, I’m happy with it thus far, and once I’ve had a chance to play with it some more, I’ll do a more indepth review for all of you. In the meantime, here’s the product page for the Summit at the Freeplay web site.
Related Stories
POSTED IN: Eco Gadgets, Human-Powered, Solar
1 opinion for Freeplay Summit Wind-up Radio Mini-Review
» Freeplay Summit Radio - Review Update Unplugged Living
Dec 12, 2005 at 7:08 pm
[…] You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your ownsite. […]
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: