A friend reminded me recently that the government wants every household to own a radio that works without the mains. I knew. I had researched wind-up radios a few months ago, settled on a model and then had budget for it as a future purchase, since the one I want is not cheap, but it is one of the best.
The advice is sensible and almost prosaic. The government’s Be Ready checklist asks us citizens to be able to manage for three days if an outage takes out electricity, water or other services and under communication it lists an FM radio, battery or wind-up. FM, note. Not DAB, not an app and not a smart speaker that falls silent the moment the router does. Not your phone either: the point is to hear the news when the mobile network and the internet have gone.
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One radio worth having
What I found when I went shopping was disappointing. The category is a heap of near-identical plastic boxes under dubious brand names, with cranks that look as if they would snap the moment you use them. They photograph well enough. I would not want to rely on one of these in the dark.
Reading reviews on trekking websites, I found one in a different league: the Sangean MMR-99. Sangean is a Taiwanese firm that has been making radios since 1974. The MMR-99 is chunky and rubber-cornered, sealed to IP55 against dust and rain - it is built to be carried rather than admired.
What it does
It is roughly the size of a house brick and weighs 837 grams. Inside is a 2,600mAh lithium battery, charged by USB-C in ordinary life and by the hand crank or the solar panel on top when the power is off. How long that lasts depends on who is counting: one German-language comparison test ran the DAB version for seventeen and a half hours on a charge and a Swedish reviewer found that ten minutes of cranking bought him more than an hour of listening. The torch has five modes, including SOS and Morse code. A USB socket will give a phone a little charge, with the stress on little. The radio comes with forty presets, an alarm and sleep timer, Bluetooth, a headphone socket and an aux input, so it can earn its place on a kitchen shelf when nothing is going wrong. With some luck that will be the only use you will ever have for it. The hope is that you prepare for emergencies that will never actually happen.
DAB or just FM?
The Sangean MMR-99 comes in two versions that look identical: DAB+/FM and AM/FM with no DAB at all. Since I want to put the radio in the kitchen and use it regularly, I was keen on the DAB option. The giveaway is in the listing: if it mentions AM or medium wave, it is not the DAB model.
Roberts, the British radio maker, sells what appears to be the same radio, as far as I can tell only in the DAB version, as the SolarDAB 99. The dimensions match the Sangean’s to the millimetre, as do the IP55 rating, the crank, the solar panel and the torch. When Roberts is willing to put its name on a radio, I take that as a very good sign indeed.
Where to get one
The DAB version is hard to find in Britain. When I checked on 25 October, the Roberts SolarDAB 99 (£149.99) was out of stock at John Lewis and everywhere else I looked, and the Sangean DAB was out in all three colours at the specialist with the lowest price. A government checklist is a reliable way to empty a shelf.
I found it on Sangean’s own European site, which ships here free, but it may attract import tax, we will see. The Amazon link is the version without DAB and it is the only one that pays me. The version I would actually buy is not the one I earn anything from.
I am recommending a radio I have not yet switched on. I will report back once I have cranked it, left it on a windowsill and listened to it with the lights off…