RCA RP7887 Super Radio 3

I like this radio so much I have two of them and I even have an older version of this one with the GE brand name before it was converted to RCA. It is the same Super Radio III that had the GE brand logo and it performs very well. It picks up stations well here in Ohio and the sound is as good as the higher priced radios at twice the price. It has the older style of tuning with the needle registering on the dial what station you are listening to. It sort of has a nostalgic 1960's feel to it and it might remind some of the radio they used when they were kids listening to the Beatles, The Rolling Stones Etc. It is solid feeling and weighs about six pounds with batteries, but it won't be blown over on a windy day! Lol. It pulls in lots of AM and FM stations a lot of the radios I have will not even touch. It has AFC if needed and it will lock into a FM station with no problem. It picks up the FM stations as well as a radio without AFC. If you are looking for a good sounding, economically priced radio this is it. It will run for hours on the batteries too. Maybe I'll get another one just in case. If they stop making them for some reason I'll be a little sad.

I bought my first GE Superradio from Amazon back around 2002. I don't know the exact date because my Amazon account does not go back that far. The radio received heavy use. It was especially great for outdoor yardwork and roof work on my home. The D battery cells make the Superradio 3 bulky but the batteries do seem to last for years and years. I used to check the price of the radio on Amazon.com and I did see it priced as low as 35 dollars ages ago. My first GE Superradio was cheap, not over 50 dollars. The sound on the old GE Superradio and the newer RCA model certainly travels quite a distance outdoors, no other radio can match it really as far as volume. The small tweeter speaker gives a quality of sound other portable radios can't match. I picked up my new RCA Superradio 3 from nuzzydeals on Amazon.com a couple weeks ago. The shipping was free and very fast. People make interesting comments comparing the old GE radio with the newer RCA model. Both radios look identical appearance wise. How do the two radios compare sound wise? Well, playing music it's a toss up as to which radio sounds better. Listening to talk radio stations the new RCA radio sounds better. The new RCA radio has a tighter bass response with the new speakers in my opinion. The calibration of the tuning dial is off quite a bit on the new RCA Superradio 3. If you tune the knob 94.7 your actual frequency is 93.7, so that's a 1 MHz difference between what the radio shows and the actual point the radio is tuned to.I bought that black C Crane EP radio a few years ago which is a smaller styled version of the Superradio 3. That radio is more portable and has a lighted display for night viewing which the Superradio does not have. The C Crane radio does not come close to the sound created by the Superradio. Playing the Superradio 3 and the C Crane EP radio side by side the C Crane radio sounds dissapointing. Nowhere near the volume of the Superradio 3. I would think the C Crane brand would have better quality control and last longer than the RCA Superradio. My old GE Superradio 3 is pretty beat up. The antenna broke a few times. The battery cover in back was impossible to keep shut. I tried duct tape which leaved a mess. I probably should have tried self stick velcro to secure the battery cover. The on/off switch broke on the old GE Superradio. I was able to break the radio open and install a new switch on my own. The tuning knob on the old GE Superradio also completely broke but again I was able to get the radio open and repair it on my own.The new RCA Superradio 3 is a good deal at it's current price. As far as sound quality, other radios can't touch it with it's large woofer and tweeter speakers. The new RCA Superradio 3 was a good deal and money well spent.

Took a while to ship, well packed, but product is a low-performance radio by my estimate because the factory adjustment is poor and the tuning pot doesn't allow for an easy recalibration of the tuning VCO, I think RCA received a bad schematic, this radio needs a different tuning pot.I have a GE version of this radio and it required no further calibration and is the only radio I have that could pick up KGO 810AM during the dayfrom 400 miles south of the transmitter.There is a low VCO tuning adjustment pot that I had to adjust to get a station at 540 Khz, but then, a 570, 600, 620, 640 and KNBR @ 680 were notin the proper dial location, they were off by 40-100 Khz on the dial and all the upper freqs at the top of the dial were missing or out of range of the VCO adjustment, so I adjusted the upper VCO pot and I can get a station at 1700 Khz but all the freqs below it are either not present or 50-150 Khz out of dial location.Normally when you adjust a new radio, you only need to adjust it at 600, 800 and 1400 Khz to get the heterodyne calibrated, otherwise you get the problems I have with this RCA version of a super-radio, VCO EMI that prevents some stations from coming in or the VCO emi is so strong that even a strong signal like a 50Kw KNX 1070 comes in so weak because it's not in sync with the heterodyne freq, this also affects the ability to use the wide/narrow band-width switch, at lower freqs before my necessaryre-calibration, the wide width made the center of a 1 kHz center freq about40-60 kHz wide and at upper freqs, it made even a strong signal hard to center because the heterodyne was so out-of-sync that a lot of stations were eaten up by emi noise.Currently this radio is a headache, once I adjust the upper freq VCO adj pot, I have to readjust the lower VCO adjust pot as calibrating for the 1400 KHz signal throws all the lower freqs out of position, then I have to re-adjust to re-acquire the 540 KHz signal, then the mid freqs are out of sync, so I adjust the upper VCO adjust pot, now both the upper and lower freqs are out of sync again.With an analog variable tuning capacitor, once you adjust the tuning caps on the top, 2 for AM, 2 for FM for the 600,800 and 1400 KHz freqs, you are set for the whole dial, hardly ever does it require more than 2 or 3 tweaks to get everything on the AM dial set up properly, from my experience, I think the main tuning pot, (variable resistor) may have used the wrong type audio taper vs. a linear taper or a combination of either with the wrong value, (using a 50K vs. a 100K ohm non-linear tapered variable resistor) that alone would explain the problems I'm having getting the entire dial calibrated.Other buyers are having good results?Maybe I got a Friday poor Q.C. serial Number, I don't know, but one thing is for sure, I did not get the same quality of radio that I got 4 years ago when GE was still labeling these radios with their own name, not RCA.