I don't have any experience with the Palstar, nor the SW77 (but I do have a
collection of other Sony portables).

Generally speaking though, my experience is that when you get your first
"decent" radio, it actually takes a few weeks to fully realise the
capabilities, and limitations, of that radio. I may be wrong, but it appears
from your post that your Palstar is a recent acquisition, which was
subjected to a side-by-side test with the Sony.

You may not be suitably qualified to conduct a reasonable test until you
have some experience with the Palstar also.

The first radio I got that had a noise blanker and a notch filter for
example, I was left thinking "What do these things actually do anyway?" I
understood what they were supposed to do, but they didn't seem to have any
effect. Only when you slow down, experiment with these features under
varying conditions do you truly realise their potential in making something
of an otherwise unintelligble signal.

My lesson was that, yes, the Sony radios will receive everything that
anything else will. A great radio won't invent a signal for you, and its not
often that the Sony will be deaf to a signal. But the better radio will
actually let you hear what is being said and even identify the signal.

I'm mostly referring to SSB utilities here, which is the bulk of my
listening.

Mark.


"Margaret von Busenhalter-Butt" wrote in message
...
Did a lot of side by side comparisons with my Sony SW77 portable. With
Sony
AN-1 and AN-LP1 antennas it turned out that the Palstar R30CC was
inferior
in both SW and MW DX. This was the case with both antennas in a noisy city
environment. In a quiet country setting it was a more even match but the
Palstar never beat the Sony. OTOH, the SW77 pulled in numerous stations
that
were not listenable with the Palstar. I'm especially surprised about the
MW
results because the Palstar is supposed to be a hot rig for that and the
SW77 is not. I really liked the Palstar on its own, but now I realize that
the receiver has serious shortcomings. For starters it really needs a sync
detector to be competitive at its price. Simplicity is not always an
asset.

Now I wonder if the Palstar would even be worthy of a Sherwood SE-3 or
should I just ebay it right away. I guess I could always keep the SE-3 for
my other radios even if the Palstar failed with it.

Any opinions would be appreciated.

Cheers,

Margaret


PS. The SW77 is a darn good radio and the Passport is clueless!