C.Crane Skywave NIT-PICK review

[nanZor]

Why "nit-pick" ? Because it is basically perfect.

The radio has been reviewed many times elsewhere, so I won't repeat all that, but provide some observations not seen..

AIRBAND DONE RIGHT for this form-factor!

Someone in engineering must have been an airband enthusiast / pilot who appreciates good audio. Which means that when wearing headphones, your ears aren't blasted with a bad agc, and even wearing more hi-fi headsets like Sennheiser MX-365 buds sounds great.

My pilot-buddy actually sounds like himself when I hear him landing at my local GA airport. The last time I *ever* heard good airband audio was from the Grundig Satellit 800. (NOT the lesser 750!)

Yes, the first syllable is missing, but if that means protecting you from a bad fast-attack that is distorted, well so be it. Squelch is reasonable on the ears too, especially when wearing headphones, which means extended listening won't tire you out with listener fatigue. It is far more pleasant to listen to than my Uniden scanner, I'll tell you that - despite the scanner being more designed for rf performance.

Being able to choose your own bandwidth is appreciated as I narrow it a bit when wearing phones, and widen it when listening to the speaker just to get a little more intelligibility out of it. Having THREE selections, rather than just a wide/narrow that actually works, is really appreciated.

Notable is the 21" whip, which just happens to be the quarter-wavelength for airband as well - albeit the radio circuit board is not much of a groundplane. AND, the very last section of the whip isn't some micro-bendy extension. Nice touch.

My weak local airband ATIS signal is easily received, on par with my scanners that have high-q airband-specific ducks like the Icom FA-B02AR attached. [provides a measure of bandpass filtering if you will] Impresssed - I didn't expect that kind of performance.

I haven't experienced any overload, but testing with the whip totally collapsed, and sitting at the visitor center at my local GA airport posed no issues, nor when flights arrive right near my closest waypoint.

FM - the 21" whip isn't a problem on FM since the radio is very sensitive. I don't need a full-length whip to hear my local Low-Power community station with its 10 mile coverage area. (KHUG rocking the blues at night, normal programming daytime). It basically picks it up as easily as my CC 2E desktop does.

AM - superb. Weather - great performance here as well.

High-resolution S-meter - didn't expect that either. Us radio nerds appreciate the higher resolution.

There's really no reason for me to go on - anything else is just a nit pick. All other radios in this class are a total JOKE when it comes to airband. Not so the Skywave. Rather than going under the mallet and anvil, the Skywave stays on the desk.

 

[nanZor]

Forgot the nit-picks!

1) The blister-pack packaging betrays the performance inside. Although I purchased from an online source like everyone else (to make sure I wasn't getting something cherry-picked), the radio deserves nicer packaging.

2) Add 8.33 khz airband channel spacing option for European airband regions

3) Move the brighter led backlight from the left to the right since more useful information is contained on the right side.

4) Although classy in appearance, the brown-on-black sub-functions of the keyboard being somewhat small, should be changed to a yellow to make them easier to read - but classy, not day-glo. These functions will be quickly memorized, but for an OOB out-of-box experience, maybe a slightly higher contrast.

5) Toss the hand-strap. Put the money saved on manufacturing thousands of these units back into the radio with the loss of the handstrap.

Not a nit-pick, but appreciated nonetheless:

Charging - I commend the engineers on providing a *reasonable* algorithm for their nimh charging in this unit. Not that I do that - I always charge outside since I'm also a battery geek, using a Maha analyzer to pair up my cells for both capacity and internal resistance and keep an eye on their health.

Mom and Dad are likely to pull badly abused cells from kid's toys to put into the Skywave, and their chosen algo makes total sense here.

Quite frankly, I'm surprised they put in a charging circuit at all. I'm not complaining - I'll use them for infrequent top-ups, but not using it as a total battery care solution. Maybe ditch the charger and put the money back into the radio circuitry itself? Hard question that only marketing can answer.

So, all basically *ridiculous* nit-picks aside, I'm totally happy with the Skywave!

 

[nanZor]

NOT a nit-pick anymore:

2) Add 8.33 khz airband channel spacing option for European airband regions

That is easily solved by the use of the fine-tuning option.

Sorry about that - I was so overjoyed with the unit that I got ahead of myself.

C.Crane hit this one out of the ballpark. No spurious stuff that I could find, even way down wearing the ridiculously large Sennheiser HD 280 Pro cans compared to it.

Trying to force the issue by doing stupid stuff like wrapping the headphone cord around the display - nothing but quiet!

From my butler:

"What will it be tonight sir, Mozart or One-Six-Right?" (Good movie)
"A little bit of both - fetch me the proper earbuds please".

I don't know what more to say. This is THE one for me.

 

[nanZor]

Air-band icing on the cake:

Ok, something I'd like to see incorporated into future versions for Air-Band:

When saving air-band freqs into memory, also save the state of individualized squelch setting, rather than just use the current global setting.

You might be listening to the same frequency at home or work, perhaps saved into different pages for different locations, but need a different squelch level.

The unit will save the state of the bandwidth, so why not save a programmable squelch level into the memory too?

Small potatoes. No biggie. Nit pick.

 

[nanZor]

AIRBAND audio tip for newcomers:

The Skywave has superb audio when listening to airband with earbuds naturally. FAR better than any of your typical scanners.

However, if your listening tastes are directed more towards general-aviation like mine are, aka "GA", rather than commercial domestic or international flights, (or if that's the only type of airport near you), then the quality of the radio transmissions from those planes can vary widely.

Those who maintain their planes tend to have good quality AM modulation, frequency response, and rf power.

Then there are those sad little planes that spend their life 24/7 with tie-down chains on the tarmac, getting severely beaten by weather for decades.

Those radios have a tendency to sound not much better than a child's toy FRS radio, and are in dire need of radio and antenna maintenance.

And unless the pilot radio is absolutely not working to the point of illegibility, then the tower or other pilots usually don't mention anything about it. Thus the unwary pilot with the bad radio never knows about the problem and goes on for years with a crappy signal.

Just a heads up not to be disappointed with the Skywave audio if that is the case in your area.

 

[nanZor]

NOT a nit-pick!

YES! The Skywave won't kill your nimh rechargeable batteries at the end of discharge! It won't harm my precious Eneloops!

I let them run down until the unit shut off naturally. But it was abrupt, signaling a smart shutoff, rather than just letting the audio get all distorted, display freaking out etc and then just dying on its own.

Normally, when nimh batteries are under load, you don't want to drag them below about 0.9V (single), or 1.0v each (for multiples in series to account for slight mismatched unbalances). I suspect CCrane took the conservative approach of 1.0v/cell, since an immediate measurement with my Fluke showed about 1.1v no-load recovery on each.

Of course one should start out with BOTH batteries fully charged to begin with.

Somebody somewhere in the chain has done their homework!

 

[nanZor]

Quality earbuds for music AND Dx'ing:

Without going into too much of an audiophile slant, I like the CCrane in-ear buds for vocal material - as proven by my 12+ hour listening test above.

I use a pair of inexpensive Sennheiser MX 365 classic buds (hang in ear, not in ear canal) types for daily musical enjoyment - and yes even airband audio is a pleasure with natural sounding human voices. Lots of choices so I won't go far into that - these were inexpensive, old-school, and sound great.

The trick to getting the best bass and lower midrange response from them is to use the stretchy-foam driver covers! Do NOT throw them away. Yeah, they are a pain to put on, but take it slow - they'll stretch.

When I put the foam covers on, I later found a spectrum chart showing the difference between "sponge on" and "sponge off" as seen in a specific chart here:

Earphone Review - Measurements Sennheiser MX365

That explains why they sound similar to my Sennheiser studio monitors with the sponge on, but pretty much like crap without.

For a radio application, the so-called "Sennheiser veil" seems to be a good fit. I guess that's enough of audiophile land, BUT when I am doing AM DX'ing, I found that having the option of using either the CCrane buds, or the Sennheisers, it comes in handy trying to pull out stations - sometimes it is easier grab ID's using one or the other.

 

[nanZor]

Battery-Nerd tests the charger:

Ultimately, when using the accessory SKWVP ac adapter, the internal charging circuitry is appropriately on the conservative side to not worry about charging in the radio. If getting an additional 2 hours of runtime after having it run for days on end is an issue for you, then invest in a QUALITY dedicated "individual cell" external charger.

Nerdy details:

A set of known quality cells was fully charged and then discharged at the industry accepted rate of .2C until they discharged to 0.9v individually.

These 2000mah rated cells tested out at near 1850mah in reality. Internal resistance was also measured to make sure that they were still normal, and not more resistor than battery.

Those cells were charged in the skywave with it's own circuitry and the accessory SKWVP ac adapter. After 10 hours, the Skywave stopped the charge.

Discharging those cells at 0.2C, or in this case 400mah revealed that when the 10 hour safety timer stopped, they had a recharged capacity of about 1600mah.

Another test was performed on half-charged cells in the Skywave, and instead of running for 10 hours, what appears to be a conservative voltage detector stopped the charge. These cells when tested at the industry standard discharge rate, showed a slight extra capacity of 1650mah.

Even though the charger did not actually truly fully charge the cells, from a *system standpoint*, the slightly conservative nature is a brilliant move to help protect the radio from the consumer.

One never knows if the end user is going to try and put batteries from his 1987 weather station into the radio/charger, which by now is more resistor than battery. Refusing to believe that batteries are consumable items, some may try and nurse zombie batteries into the afterlife, making the Skywave their coffin.

So from a systems standpoint, the Skywave does the appropriate thing on the conservative side, and although I use external chargers, I have no qualms about topping batteries up in the Skywave whenever I feel like it.

 

[nanZor]

Large capacity cells? Just do a double-charge ..

This time using a pair of Eneloop Pro that have a measured discharge capacity of 2300mah, it took two charge sessions to complete.

As before, the 10-hour safety timer kicked in, necessitating another charge.

This time, the measured discharge capacity of the cells was 2150 mah. So just *slightly* less than a true full charge. Consistent with the lower-capacity cell test that came in just slightly.

GREAT - for an in-radio charger, this is the smart way to handle it. The other options to obtain a totally true full charge is to overcharge the cells and quickly cut down on their cycle life and raise cell resistance. Or do the usual slow-roast trickle, which while feeling cool to the touch does much the same damage.

Bravo to CCrane for opting for the best overall slightly conservative systems solution.

Note that in my tests, the gold-standard unit is the Maha / Powerex MH-C9000 charger analyzer. Not only useful for inquiring end-users, but to also help keep distributors, and those who distribute batteries with their product, from being subject to counterfeits and/or quality control problems somewhere in their distribution chain.