Retekess V115 Shortwave Radio, Digital Radio AM FM, Shortwave Receiver with 1000mAh Rechargeable Battery, Presets, TF/AUX Playback and Recording, Bass Speaker, for Camping

Nice radio, small size with big sound. Easy to use and easy to record or play mp3. I like the long lasting rechargeable battery. I camp frequently and this helps with some music and entertainment.

I bought this mostly to play music and ebooks. I like the radio reception as well, its better than most especially for its size. I live on a hill that blocks most of the radio stations, I was surprised that this unit received stations I can't usually pick up on the FM. Sound quality is amazing for the size of the enclosure and the size of the driver. I found it will play mp3,wav and wma. it does not claim to do FLAC or MP4 (aac) files and in fact won't cause I tried it... I had a problem with the sd card not latching in place after I removed it a couple times. I opened it and found there is a small metal tab that provides tension on the spring bar that latches the sd card. I pushed that metal tab down a bit with a tiny screwdriver and it works fine again. I picked up a couple spare batterys, looks like I'll be using this for a good while. I have a pi-pirate radio, 3 or 4 Logitech squeezebox streaming radios, a jvc, etc,etc.as far as computer radios go , this one doesn't lag as much as the others, the fidelity is great on playback and the controls are easy to figure out after a bit of messing about with it . sound reproduction is better than an Ihome ipod dock I've got it next to. Overall for less than the price of a case of beer or a couple bottles of fine sparkling cold duck, what we've got here is an outright entertainment bonaza, that fits in your pocket. I liked it so much I gave my brother one. doesn't pickup much on the shortwave, but thats not really what I bought it for. all in all a dandy radio for office, kitchen or garage, even fits under the pillow if you like audiobooks. one of the better radio products I've used, especially at its price point. Great travel radio. edit 3/25/2020 - well I now own 2 of these little babies. so to keep them straight. I did a little cosmetic mod to one of them and colored in the indentations on the Volume rocker and the transport buttons. I used a white Sharpie (oil based) and a half a dozen q-tips dipped in alcohol for cleanup. I tried masking but my mad skills weren't up to it, turned out it was easier to just apply carefully the paint, then let it dry and remove the overage with the qtips. I wound up doing 2 coats to get sufficient coverage. not bad for 20 minutes work at the most, and it makes it easy to see which one is which at a glance.

The Retekess V115P is a feature filled little radio with a very good speaker for its size. I don’t notice much difference between it and a Sony desktop receiver I have. Performance is mixed. I find that FM and weather band are very good. AM is fine for local stations, but this is definitely not a DX machine. Some distant stations that I routinely get at night on some other radios just aren’t there. SW performance is similar. Strong stations come in well, but the radio really struggles on some weaker ones that I am used to hearing. The radio has a jack for an external antenna that may help with this, but I haven’t tried it. I have not tried longwave, since we have no LW stations, nor the Bluetooth reception or the play and record functions using a micro SD card (up to 32 GB). I am pleased to see that it’s possible to record both voice and radio. The manual is very thorough and well written. Also, customer service is superb. I emailed Retekess with a question about accessing stations that have been saved with an ATS scan and received a very helpful reply within only about two hours. Am I glad I have this radio? Yes. It’s great for local listening and weather, and I can see a need for some of its special features. Update: Since writing my initial review I found I could not get the sleep function to work. Customer service helped me by explaining that the band button needs to be pressed as a last step, something not mentioned in the manual. The sleep function then starts again each time the radio is turned on until the number of minutes to play is reset to 0. There is no sleep function indicator in the display.

I purchased this radio because I discovered it can record radio onto a MicroSD/TF card. After using it a bit, here is my review. Pros: For its small 1-inch speaker, it sounds pretty good. Not fantastic, but good. The speaker doesn't distort when turning it up high. Stereo sound on Headphones, and it sounds quite good with headphones. The radio recorder works very well. It records as an MP3 file, and there are 3 recording quality settings. It records at 128kbps on the low end and 320kbps on the high end and something in the 200s in the middle. You can also play those MP3s or other MP3s you have on the data card. One-touch recording to start recording quickly if you hear something on the radio and want to quickly record it. You can also use it as a voice memo recorder. The Display has big numbers and is quite legible. Comes with a good backlight. Has a 15" telescoping Antenna. AM and FM Reception is good for local or semi-local stations. Not really for DXing. Digital Tuning. Yeah! You can tune by either punching in the frequency directly or moving up and down the presets. Customizable presets for each band. 9 kHz or 10 kHz stepping for AM, making it useful all around the world. It receives a wide band of shortwave bands, from 4.75 to 25 MHz. You can set a sleep timer when listening. Has a very common, user accessible, rechargeable battery, so you can charge more than 1 battery and swap it out when charging is not available. Recharges using a USB-C cable. It's light and is a small size. It will fit easily in a shirt pocket. Has an audio-in jack. Comes with a wrist strap with a little kickstand that you can plug into a notch on the back of the radio. It has no clock. I consider that a Pro. Cons: The User Interface for many of the features is poor. It takes some effort to figure things out. The manual is not super helpful. Shortwave reception is poor. It might be better if you purchased one of those long clip-on wire extension antennas, but as equipped, it is poor. The V115 is feature-rich and very useful for listening to & recording AM/FM radio. Bottom line, I think it's a good featured unit for only $20. The ability to record radio to MP3 is why I bought it.

Good for FM, The sound believe it or not is not bad with lows. I did not expect that. But the real reason I wanted this is for the shortwave band. Even outside at night about all you could hear is WWV on 5.000 or 10.000 and that's about it. I am a ham radio operator and have HF antennas up high and tested with that. Found strong signals on this radio and then went outside and this radio did not hear it and the included antenna. You have to direct entry the frequency because the scan on this shortwave radio simply don't stop on anything, even on WWV. I am not returning because I did not expect much but wanted to test and was hoping for better results. I would not buy again. If you just want it for FM and the built-in USB charging battery, then it's worth every penny.

Radio works well with lot of functions such as recording with micro SD card and sleep timer. Our radio antenna broke off after 6 months of use and the store promptly sent us a brand new antenna from China. Great customer services!

The radio looks really good since it's nicely duplicated the designs of those top brands in the 70s. Radio seems to pick up AM and FM stations okay, but its UI (i.e., user interface) to program the radio is nothing but horrible, due to no simple steps to manually add your favorite stations. It can scan your local stations to add them automatically, but who needs so many Mexican or Chinese stations for your favorites if you don't understand either of their languages? Since it's cumbersome to delete so many of the stations from your favorites, which were added automatically, one at a time, I switch to adding them one by one manually. The steps to program adding just one radio station are so freaking and unnecessarily complicated. One simple mistake you made will throw you back to step 1 all over again. Within minutes after receiving this radio, I decided to send it back since it is useless to me since its UI is illogical. You could kill your precious time to program the radio and start to enjoy it for possibly many years, but what if you lose the user's manual in the long run and decide to add or change your favorite list? The steps to program are not logical at all, and you'd be lucky if those guys decided to stay in business when you need their support the most. It's nothing but a good-looking PoS.

I was looking for a small mp3 player with a speaker for when I do yard work or go fishing. This little radio is perfect. Sound quality is pretty good, loud if you want it to be, and there's a bunch of sound effect settings for the equalizer to try out, normal seems the best, but the jazz isn't bad either. Took some time to figure out with manual, bit of a learning curve initially, but it's not bad so don't get frustrated by it. Deleting station is a bit of a pain because I couldn't figure out how to delete all. Just buy a tf card of whatever size you want, power it on, connect to computer and it functions like a flash drive to load your music. You can change the play modes as well like random etc. I also love the ability to swap out the batteries using the BL-5C batteries which are cheap and solid. Radio works fine as well, but I don't listen to the radio much anymore. Anyway, portable mp3 player with speaker and a battery you can change out trivially for this price is a winner.