wrote in message
oups.com...
Not sure I understand which radios are copies of Drakes....

I've heard that about the quality many of the later Satellit radios.
The Grundig name to me is associated with mellow sounding luggable
radios having lots of controls and several analog dials. As I
remember
the later digital models always seemed to always have some sort of
issue with either audio quality, the synch detector or memory
controls
that took some of the edge from a premium priced receiver. The last
one I played with was the Satellit 700 and found it completely
un-intuitve to use. I gave up waiting for it's successor because
Grundig USA seemed to lurch from one postponment to another.

I understand the Chinese badged version of the latest Satellit can
be
had for $300.00 - is that possible? I have no idea what the
Satellit
badged version sells for.

$449 (+S/H) from Universal, or a reconditioned one
(courtesy of Drake) for $399 from Universal. What
Lextronics (which became Eton, I believe) did was
to go to Drake, purchase the rights to use the guts
of the Drake SW8 in the Satellit 800, then Lextronics
did some work to add in FM BCB, their own audio,
and a few other tweaks. Then Lextronics licensed
Tecsun to build them. That's the (extremely) short
summary of how the Sat 800 came to be.

As I like to put it, where the radio works, you can
thank Drake, and where it doesn't you can thank
Lextronics/Eton. The SW8 is a nice portatop, and
while the Sat 800 has nicer sound, the SW8 had
some intangibles with it to make it more useful
(solid construction vs. Chinese QA/QC problems,
and more birdies in the Sat 800 than in the SW8,
to name two). However, the SW8 was a couple
hundred dollars more than the Sat 800, and if you
got a good model or a reconditioned one, it was
(and is still) a good value.

--Mike L.