Review Detail

While walking around the home depot recently, I came across this item in the clearance bin, it was part of a combo paired up with a P200 drill one of my favs, (which I thought Ryobi had stopped making) and a battery, I wasn’t interested in the radio, and I just considered it as more of a bonus, what I really wanted was the extra battery and the P200 to replace my slowly dying 5 year model.

Well one day while working on a roof I decided to give this little guy a try and was pleasantly surprised, it wasn’t the absolute gimmick I kinda thought it was. The sound is pretty loud for a unit of its size, but if your using earplugs or loud power tools it will get quickly drowned out as I learned.
The greatest asset of this unit is its portability, it’s extremely transportable you can throw it in a tool bag no problem and find room to place it anywhere. I’ve used it in crawl spaces, small bathrooms, roof with jack stands, list goes on.
Another nice feature is the aux port which allows you to connect your mp3 player, old walkman, etc to the radio.
Radio operation is pretty straight forward, a volume control dial that operates the on/ off and volume. A little toggle switch, that allows you to click in either direction to change the station on the digital read out, it’s effective but very slow.

The strengths of the radio has to be its price, decent sound, mp3 player auxiliary capability

The weakness of this unit is there is no AM. For some reason there is no AM, which is a huge for sports fans or people who listen to talk radio. I found this out the hard way when roofing, went to put on a baseball game, and couldn’t find the AM, had to climb down the ladder to get my pocket radio. Another weakness is no presets, seek or scan button, which wouldn’t be that big of a deal if the toggle scan was somewhat fast. Lastly it’s Mono, but that’s to be expected in a unit this size.

Overall it’s an affordable, decent sounding radio with iffy reception that works with MP3 players and the Ryobi one battery system which provides severals hours of music on a full charge. I got mine as a bonus but would pay the 20 bucks that this unit costs on it's own.