That unfortunately describes most digital radios to a tee!
The OPs best chance is to find a Maplin carrier for 5 batteries (probably have to do it as a 2 and a 3) and then feed the radio with the output of that as a nominal external 6v supply. Generally it is easier to run them on mains since they all use too far much current.
They look OK and sound OK if you have enough signal otherwise they eat batteries and break up into burbling subterraneans off Stingray which is OK if you like that sort of thing but otherwise fairly annoying.
I have given up entirely on DAB and now stream radio over ethernet.
That sounds unusually bad, but my experience is broadly similar DAB is a waste of space consuming batteries very rapidly and with borderline signal is not actually worth listening to. I have built several different DAB aerials to improve things and can now get enough signal provided it doesn't rain with leaves on the trees but I have given up on DAB and now stream radio over ethernet which suffers a longer delay from realtime but doesn't keel over anything like so easily.
Most of the DAB radios I have are pretty useless and crash out to dead air if they encounter any signal corruption they don't like even with a very good aerial. This affects the earliest (expensive) one I got and the most recent ones too (if anything the most recent are worse).
Unless you are partial to listening to the silence of the pregnant pauses on R3 or John Cages's 4'33" DAB radio has nothing to offer :(
If you can power it from mains. Cheap wall wart will do it.
And will probably work OK with NiMH cells too. As wartime emergency radios DAB will be completely useless since most people will run out of batteries within 48 hours unless they have huge personal stocks.
Your best bet is to look for a mains powered wall wart to power it.
The thing will eat batteries like there is no tomorrow and will only ever be happy with primary cells or if you are feeling brave an external battery box containing 5x 1.25 NiMH/NiCads.
If you must use internal batteries feed it the cheapest nastiest Poundshop zinc chloride batteries you can find - they will never have time to leak since you will be replacing them every three days or so.
This is par for the course the chipsets barely work to begin with and draw just enough current to be troublesome but not enough to benefit from the very low internal resistance of the rechargeable cells. The result is that with a very fresh newly charged set of NiMH you might if you are lucky get an hour or so out of it before it fails "low battery".
It is unlikely to work satisfactorily on rechargable batteries that an end user who isn't happy with electronics can handle.
I might be tempted to try my luck with 2x rechargable AA Lithium cells (nominal 3.6v) and a silicon diode in series with each. This is not for the fainthearted - mistakes could result in them catching fire!
Boeing, Sony and Toshiba have all had serious fires from this technology and it is very unforgiving.
I wonder if high battery consumption has anything to do with poor implementation. I have a modern Pure portable which has good battery consumption. When teletext was new a decoder (as built by GEC) used masses of TTL chips with a correspondingly high power consumption, then Mullard did it all in one chip!
I have a personal DAB radio that works off a single AA cell. An 800mAH rechargable battery gives me about 5hrs listening in DAB mode; 15-20 hours in MP3 mode. It's the ATMT MP170 which is a pretty-well outmoded design now but there are still one or two about on Amazon.
The piss poor audio quality is only because they standardised on the wrong (too early) MP2 codec as opposed to MP4/AAC in DAB+ and too low a bitrate. There is no reason why DAB couldn't be almost studio quality Radio3 manages extremely good quality over the internet at 320kbps AAC.
I've had DAB here in the form of a tuner since very early on - due to the them poor FM reception in this part of S London. And the quality was just fine before the bitrate was reduced. To be fair take up was very poor among those who in theory cared about audio quality (Hi-Fi types) who probably weren't much interested in radio by then. And of course the reduced bitrate allowed more channels per mux.
I no longer use DAB at home - FreeView receivers are cheaper. ;-) But I do have it in one car where the better reception than FM in London is appreciated.
Exactly. yu are running with DAB a whole computer and RAM assembly at bloody high speed to do all the decoding.
Its where an ARM chip and integrated DAC plus a few others is the way to go, but not all chipsets are created equal.
Had exactly the same issues on model RC gear when the old SW based 'FM' receivers - drawing 5mA or so were replaced by hungry 'digital' stuff at
2.4Ghz,drawing 20-40mA and suddenly people were running out of battery much earlier than they thought. Worse, they had an annoying habit of going totally apeshit if - say - retracting the undercarriage put such a strain on the battery that the voltage dropped below 5V..
The only rechargeable "1,5V" cells that I know of are the rather dubious Nickel Zinc (NiZn) ("1.65v nominal") rechargeables which were developed into a commercial product a few years ago but they still had issues, not the least being their excessively high fully charged voltage of 1.85v per cell.
Some kit could handle this, but other kit could be damaged by a straight swapout from a 1.5v per cell battery pack (4 x 1.85v = 7.4v, somewhat higher than the 6.6v typically seen in a fresh 4 cell battery pack)
NiMH is "Still all the rage" today in as far as they replace NiCad cells designed as drop-in substitutes for carbon zinc or alkaline primary cells. However, the latest "All the Rage" feature is the development of Low Self Discharge (LSD) versions (at a modest reduction of AH capacity) which vastly improves their usability.
If you're looking to buy replacement NiMH AA cells today, I strongly advise against getting 'ordinary' NiMH cells (typically 3AH capacities) and choose the LSD type even if the AH capacity is reduced to between 2 and 2.5 AH. In practice, the lower rate of self discharge will give you a much longer service life in something like a compact digital camera or conventional portable radio.
I hope that sentiment includes 'and all' since there's a lot more to come. :-)
Quite frankly, that battery performance sounds "bloody awful' if it can't be powered from a set of fully charged NiMH cells (hint: check the voltage of those NiMH cells of yours. They should each read around the 1.4v mark shortly after being fully recharged and settle down to around 1.35v a day or so after).
It has been the practice for the last 5 decades or so with kit designed for portable battery powered operation (particulary when primary carbon zinc cells or their modern alkaline equivilents are the power source) to design for an end of life voltage of 1 volt per cell.
Quite clearly, unless you have a duff cell or two in your battery of NiMH cells, this practice has not been followed since the end point voltage per cell appears to be higher than the 1.2 volt end point for NiMH and NiCad which both exhibit a pretty flat discharge voltage curve from a high point of 1.4v down to 1.2v after which the voltage, on a constant current load, plummets rather rapidly below the 1v mark.
Since the designers chose a 4 cell battery pack, the radio would reasonably be expected to continue working down to 4 volts (possibly as high as 4.4v) which _will_ allow the use of NiMH in place of primary 1.5v carbon zinc or alakaline cells (battery holder contact resistance issues aside).
The problem appears to be due to bad design and therefore you'd be within your rights to return it as "Unfit for Purpose" (but make sure that your NiMH pack is producing a voltage of 4.8v or better before storming off to the shop).
The designer has two choices when it comes to battery power solutions. The first is to design the circuit to work off a more economic battery cell count (1, 2 or 4) where possible, or else specify the number of cells required to meet this 1v per cell rule by using a non standard cell count such as 3 or, in this case, 5 cells.
Modern switching regulator technology can be used to power kit that needs a voltage higher than the battery can maintain e.g. a single or two cell LED torch or maintain a 3.3v logic supply off a two cell 3 volt battery or 5 volts off a four cell battery. Plainly none of these options have been applied in this case.
Considering the much higher current drain and voltage sensitivity of a DAB portable radio compared to its conventional analogue counterpart (the classic 'Tranny Radio'), you'd expect a hell of a lot more thought would be put into this aspect of a portable DAB radio's performance.
From all the comments on the very short battery life of portable DAB radios that I've been observing over the past 5 or 6 years, it would seem that the 'battery option' has simply been 'bolted on' as an afterthought in almost all cases.
Alternatively, you could simply purchase your AA zinc carbon 'Super Heavy Duty' cells 16 at a time from your local Pound Shop, in my case, "Poundworld"(tm).
I purchsed a set only yesterday on account I needed _one_ ordinary carbon zinc _unjacketted_ cell for my venerable analogue multimeter. The steel jacketing used on the more commonly available zinc carbon and alkaline cells desentisizes the meter movement by reducing the reluctance of the leakage magnetic flux of the meter's magnet; a problem common to almost all makes of such meters back in the day. This is a classic case of "Only a cheap zinc carbon cell will do the job.".
You might be forgiven for thinking that the only mistake a designer can make to curse battery powered kit with unnaturally short battery life is to under-specify the cell count.
Well, it would be only right and proper to forgive such thinking since I've only ever experienced the opposite case of too high a cell count resulting in a halving of battery life.
You might be surprised to know that it was a Sinclair product which exhibited this "Schoolboy Howler" example of sloppy design. The item in question being his 'famous' Executive Electronic Handheld Calculator which used a set of _FOUR_ aspirin sized silver oxide cells when only _THREE_ were actually required.
Quite simply, the lack of any voltage regulation and the simple LED display driver circuit used meant the surplus to requirements extra
1.5v caused it to draw two or more times the current that was actually needed to provide an amply lit display (the calculator would cheerfully keep functioning even when the battery voltage dropped so low that you could only see the display in a darkened room).
My solution, once I'd realised why the battery life was so excerable was simple. I just made up a dummy cell to reduce the active cell count to three. Double the battery life at 75% of the cost which made it nearly 3 times more economic to run (those silver oxide cells weren't particularly cheap).
Clive might have been an 'innovator' but he had a very bad habit (as many can testify with many of his 'other innovations') of being a bit 'slapdash' in the matter of design and component choice. This one particular example sticks in my mind simply because of the sheer scale of its monumental stupidity.
I rather got the impression that the radio was supplied with its own wallwart.
+1 for that advice :-) Poundland only had the steel jacketed heavy duty zinc carbon AA cell pack (8 or 12 per pack) and I had to shop in Poundworld before I found the type I needed (a pack of 16).
The only risk is that you might forget to remove them if the radio isn't being used portably for any extended period. Unfortunately usually an unplanned for event for which the need to empty the battery compartment might not become apparent until it's too late. :-(
If the radio had been designed properly in the matter of using the One volt per cell end point rule, you should still get full uitlity out of a set of rechargeables.
A very good point which suggests that such a solution would be best implemented as an external battery pack. Once you're considering the use of an external battery pack, you might as well consider using a set of four D cells (cheap heavy duty carbon zinc, 2 for a quid in most pound shops which will give just over 7 times the AH capacity of AA carbon zinc cells).
On the face of it, buying 8 times the AH's worth in AA cell form for the same 2 quid spend would seem to be better value but it's likely that the much lower cell resistance of the D cell size will more than compensate for this anyway so it's very likely that, in terms of run time, you'll be no worse off and you'll have the benefit of only having to change the battery pack once per 2 quid spend versus 8 times per 2 quid spend on two 16 pack sets of AAs.
The external battery pack, regardless of whether it's to implement a
2 cell rechargeable lithium battery pack or just to allow the use of a pack of four cheap D cell sized 'heavy duty' carbon zinc batteries does rather neatly solve the issue of increased risk of damaging the radio itself due to fire or corrosion.
Unless you absolutely must have 'self contained portability', an external pack has a lot going for it.
Not just those companies, Dell was one of the first laptop makers forced to recall their product by the millions for exactly this problem. There are plenty of Youtube videos demonstrating the ferocity of lithium battery fires if you care to search.
I have very good experience using the Nickel Zinc batteries from Maplin in a digital camera (high drain), but have not tried them in a digital radio.
The digital radio in use here is a Pure model which uses 6 C sized cells. It uses NiMH rechargeables from Lidl, and are charged by the Lidl charger, it seems to be rather good.
BUT, as others have said, don't expect much running time from a DAB radio on batteries compared to an FM radio.
I bought one of the NiMH ChargePaks for mine, it cooked itself in little over a year, the battery had expanded and pushed its way out of the compartment, so I replaced it with a Li-ion ChargePak that lasted a few years (it was more or less only ever used as a builtin UPS for the radio/alarm rather than as a battery radio) but is now also dead.
Blimey. We have a couple of Pure radios/chargepaks in the family - the large white weatherproof ones. The one I bought my sister is still going strong after 3 years, about 50/50 battery mains. The other, the battery died about 3 years back after 8 years. It's still inside. Must take a look.
As it is, I've got a few portable dab radios, and they're excellent for my use - R4 and 6, and the occasional weird station - in the kitchen/study/diying.
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