Hello, I'm James Criddon, the radio futurologist,
and this is my latest blog post from October
the 4th. It's a review of the Deep Elec DP666
radio receiver. Yes, I blame radio's Steve Martin,
not that one, for this. I've been looking for
a little travel radio for a while now, and I'd
like something with FM and AM and shortwave on
it. Ideally DAB and HD. This sadly has neither
of them. I'd also like some RDS as well, so I
know what I've tuned into in a foreign land.
I'd like it to be small, and I'd like it to charge
off USB -C, please. Now, I mentioned this on
Blue Sky, and Radio's Steve Martin, that one
but not that one, responded and recommended me
this one, the DeepElec DP666. He said it had
quite a few geeky settings or words to that effect,
and my goodness, he wasn't wrong. It's about
£55 or about $108 Australian dollars from AliExpress,
where I bought it. It's based on a NXP TEF6686
chip, which is a software -controlled radio.
It comes in a little carry case. It's got a screw
-in FM antenna. And yes, it's got a USB charging
cable. And my goodness, is it geeky. So on my
blog, you can see a picture of it tuned into
triple M. And it's telling me, well, it's telling
me various things. It's telling me that the signal
strength is 67 .1 dB microvolts. It's got a CN.
What's that? Something noise. Anyway, that's
set to 41 dB at the moment for some reason. It's
broadcasting on 104 .5 on the FM band. Its bandwidth
is 236 kilohertz. It's got a program type of
rock music. It's got a PS, a program segment.
Program segment? Is that what PS stands for?
Anyway, it's a triple M. And it's got radio text
on there as well. Elton John on 104 .5 triple
M, it says. And it tells me what the time is.
And it tells me all kinds of other stuff. My
goodness, it's geeky. And the big color touchscreen
that it has. if you press different elements
of the screen, you turn on different things as
well. So it's a stereo radio station, obviously,
but I've told it not to bother decoding the stereo
bit. because I touched the stereo signal indicator
to turn it into mono. And so that's what it did.
It's got all the bands on there, lots of the
short waves, long wave, AM, even L -band FM,
which is empty here in Australia. You can control
almost everything that you'd want from there.
You can control the de -emphasis for FM. You
can control the step and the bandwidth for AM.
All types of things. If you tuned in to ABC Radio
Brisbane on medium wave, it behaves OK. It's
got a telescopic antenna. I suspect for better
medium wave reception, you probably want a proper
AM antenna, but it worked fine for all of the
AM stations that I would expect to listen to.
It suffers a little from some whistly interference
from somewhere, but given that my house may have
just a few microprocessors in it, frankly, it's
not doing too badly. If you touch the RDS icon
on the screen, it gives you even more information.
My goodness, with lots of additional information.
So, for example, 4ZZZ, the community station
here, they use RDS very nicely. Dynamic program
type for each program, although 4ZZZ do have
a little bit of fun deliberately setting heavy
rock shows as easy listening, which is a little
joke of theirs, I understand. There's no EON
or RT plus being broadcast on four triple Z.
B105 and triple M do broadcast RT plus, but it's
just blank. Good job, SCA. It would support alternative
frequency. And if I turn the feature on, it would
also switch to the best signal as well. If I
wanted it to, it's very smart. The FM receiver
in this radio is brilliant. It picks up all kinds
of radio stations here, stations that I've never
received before on any other FM tuners I own,
many from the Gold Coast and further away, most
with full RDS. It's a very good FM receiver indeed,
and the additional information on the big screen
is lovely. I listened in Canada to CBC Radio
1 Calgary, where it worked excellently. It sounded
just as fine as a little portable radio will,
with a surprisingly decent speaker. There's a
headphone socket on one side. There's a full
physical power switch underneath, so you don't
need to worry about the power button being pressed
accidentally. running down the battery, which
I believe lasts for 17 hours, so that's not too
bad. The volume control and the tuning knob are
both physical. The tuning knob is also used to
navigate through the menus. The build is a bit
weird. The case is made out of the same material
that PCBs are made from, and I'm not quite sure
how long -lasting that would be. It feels quite
brittle to me. Perhaps that's why it comes with
a nicely padded travel case. Who knows? And anyway,
that's not all. The unit has Bluetooth inside
for a reason I haven't got any understanding
of. I can't seem to pair it to anything. The
manual doesn't mention it other than says that
it's got Bluetooth inside. So that's nice. But
the unit also has Wi -Fi inside, which is relatively
easy to set up. And that enables you to connect
this radio to some open software called XDR -GTK,
which allows you to control the radio receiver.
from a computer. And if you use that computer,
if you use that software on a Mac, then, well,
firstly, I had to build it from source, which
was surprisingly unpainful. But it gives you
all kinds of information on the screen as well,
which is very nice. You can use that to switch
stations and view RDS information. I believe
you can get it to tune into AM. on there as well.
I couldn't quite make that work, but I'm sure
that it's possible. The USB -C port lets you
charge the device. You can run the radio under
USB -C power as well. It's also capable of communications,
and I don't know quite what you can do with it
other than use XDRGTK on a wired connection.
I believe you can also use a piece of software
called RDS Spy. Interestingly, it's got firmware,
which is open, open source firmware. I'm using
the firmware, which is called Megatron Mod 17,
which came on the device. But that's not the
official firmware. The official firmware was
from March, but some folks worked out how to
get both the buttons and the touchscreen working
on the device. So the new firmware, which is
installed when you buy it from DeepElec directly,
now works with the touchscreen as well as the
buttons. So that's very cool. Now, I believe
that this radio receiver may also be able to
power one of the FMDX web servers. Now, if you've
not discovered those, These are really cool.
They are radio tuners plugged into the internet.
Go to servers .fmdx .org. So you can just listen
to the radio wherever you'd like. It's not very
obvious when you connect to one, but if you press
the play button, then you get to hear the audio,
obviously, as well. I'm guessing that you probably
need to plug the radio into an always -connected
computer like a Raspberry Pi. But yeah, you could
potentially do that. And the open source firmware
for this chipset is by a team called FMDX. They
take donations, by the way, at buymeacoffee .com
slash FMDX. And the team behind it have been
featured in Radio World magazine as well. So
you know that they're pucker. And now what I
was hoping is that this radio could also be used
somehow to decode DAB. Sadly, it can't. But the
Radio World article says that they are working
on developing a DAB Plus tuner. And there is
a separate DAB Plus device which uses a different
chipset. But wouldn't it be excellent if it was
all in the one box? So it probably doesn't come
as a surprise that I would love to learn how
to help to add DAB Plus to this device or something
similar, because that would make this radio absolutely
perfect. If you want to see pictures of it, you'll
find it linked from the show notes. And as ever,
keep listening.