The Tecsun PL-680, a poor man’s ICF-2001D.

Te Tecsun PL-680 may be the last truly analogue world band receiver ever produced. It still has analogue IF filters and an analogue demodulator. Newer radios like the PL-880 use the Silicon Labs Si473x DSP chip for IF filtering and demodulation instead.. It was introduced in 2016, almost 10 years ago. Its very similar predecessor, the PL-660, dates back to 2010.

It shares some desirable features with the Sony ICF-2001D (or ICF-2010).

• It covers the same bands, including the air traffic control band.
• It has two IF bandwidths on longwave, mediumwave and shortwave.
• It has a decent synchronous detector. Not nearly as good as Sony’s, but certainly very useful and better than the one that comes with some DSP radios..
• It has a a very smooth tuning knob, capable of tuning in 1 kHz steps.
• It’s very easy to tap a frequency on the keypad.

The only thing that’s really missing is the 32 dedicated preset buttons. Of course, the Tecsun has tons of presets, but you need to use the V/M button or page buttons to get to them.

For a start: I really hate the variable tuning speed as is used by default. But hold down the STEP button for a second or so and the radio will stay in slow tuning mode, which means 1 kHz steps. It will stay that way until you change batteries. I switched the mediumwave to American mode, so I can monitor the band segment between 1620 and 1710 kHz, where some pirate stations may be heard. Now that manual tuning is in 1kHz steps anyway, it does not matter if the fast steps are now 10kHz instead of 9.kHz. The PL-680 has absolutely mute-free manual tuning, something the less expensive DSP-based radios like the Tecsun PL-330 cannot offer.

For SSB we have a 1kHz tuning step plus an analogue clarifier knob (and it does have selectable LSB and USB). It’s a really nice radio to tune around the ham bands.SSB has good audio without any wobble and without the distortion at the onset of each word, as many of the more modern DSP-based radios have.

It performs very well on shortwave. Of course it does not play in the same league as the legendary ICF-2001D, but what radio does?

The PL-680 runs on four regular AA batteries, which may be alkaline or NiMH, which I prefer to the modern 16850 LiIon cells.All in all a very nice radio to have around and to enjoy listening to.