The new HanRongDa HRD-747 portable spotted on Ali Baba

19 Replies

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Michael Schuster, who writes:

The Shenzhen HanRongDa HRD-747 is now spotted in the wholesale supply channel at US$53, minimum order 2 pieces.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/HRD-747-Portable-All-Band-Mini_1600253429230.html

The Ali listing has some closeups showing the display and key functions, battery compartment, sockets, and even a brief video demonstrating airband reception.

Thank you for sharing this, Mike! I would welcome a review of this portable!

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19 thoughts on “The new HanRongDa HRD-747 portable spotted on Ali Baba”

  1. Patricio Oelckers

    Received my HRD-747 last friday, I bought it from Chunbell Store in Aliexpress, it took about three weeks to arrive to Chile.

    Don´t expect an spectacular performance, but it works, and it is not so difficult to use. And for shortwave a PL-368 is better.

    It is a good radio for having it allways near

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  3. Paul JAMET

    Last year, Alibaba told me that the HRD-747 Mini Digital AM FM SW AIR Pocket Portable Radio Receiver would be available in August! From time to time, I was watching and this morning – January 24, 2022 – after reading Laurie’s contribution:

    https://swling.com/blog/2021/06/the-new-hanrongda-hrd-747-portable-spotted-on-ali-baba/

    I discover that it is now proposed by the same online store hosted on the Aliexpress website at significantly different prices but always with the same delivery date, March 3, 2022:

    https://fr.aliexpress.com/item/1005003818351982.html : 82.72€ delivered in France

    https://fr.aliexpress.com/item/1005003818374420.html : 76.44€ delivered in France

    Please note that the delivery date for the USA is March 13th

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  4. Laurie

    I have just taken ownership of a HanRongDa 747 and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised.
    You simply have to get your head around the stepping and how to activate/deactivate the settings, functions etc.

    I did a very quick comparison against my Tecsun 660 (which I must add I absolutely love) and it was neck and neck on MW FM and SW but …. the Airband on the 747 blew the 660 away! I live 15 miles between Heathrow and Gatwick and I have no trouble getting the various on my better radios. The Tecsun on Air is ok but nothing out of this world whereas the 747 had total clarity and excellent coverage. The squelch is worth learning.

    As mentioned in a post, definitely be careful with the antenna, it’s very thin and will certainly bend if you try to close it quickly.
    I’m still working my way around this 747 so will update once I’ve tried it outside and with a long wire antenna. In the meantime, if you like small and gun radios I recommend this.

    Best …
    Laurie

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    1. Earl E Tasca

      So I have received 2 the other day on one the fm does not work,yes the anteanna is pin thin all in all I am disappointed but will try to get used to the miniture print and figure out the settings. I live very close to pvd airport and get that traffic all day on other radios same with cb but no luck with these yet.any suggestions or comment very appreciated.

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  5. Jordan

    This radio looks really interesting.

    Right now I have a Tecsun PL-380, but am interested in getting something that can handle SSB.

    I was thinking about the PL-330, but the VHF and UHF capability on this little Hanrongda radio is a nice and very welcome bonus.

    Is there anything out there that compares in terms of band coverage? The ideal would be something like a “Malahit” receiver but the real / non-buggy ones are expensive and hard to come by.

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    1. Mike Murray

      I have had the radio for 4 days. There are a number of software bugs causing serious issues.
      1: Air band has no gain. No coverage whasoever. It is caused I think by a setting that cannot be turned off. The setting is 2MIX. You can turn on that 2MIX setting on short wave which also disables short wave but on short wave you can reset it back to “off” by taking out the battery. No such luck with Air band. It stays on permanantly with the air band.
      I am not sure what the setting does as it’s function or use not mentioned in the manual.
      If somebody has any ideas on how to fix this or what that setting does, let me know.
      2: There is no bandwidth selection on SSB.
      3: There is interference that sounds like a whine on ssb when you have a florescent energy saving bulb on in the same room. Points to bad internal shielding. I thought the radio was faulty until I switched off the light and it stopped.
      4: On Upper side band, voice transmission is high pitched and fine tuning does not normalise it. Lower side band is fine.
      Looks like I got the buggy pre-release version. Damn.

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      1. Barry Felstein

        I just got one, and mine doesn’t seem to have the issues yours does. The good:

        Decent volume, it’s no boom box, but for it’s size, it’s not bad.

        Seems to be stable on SW. SSB seems fine on both LSB and USB.

        Once you get some frequencies in memory, you can navigate around pretty quickly.

        The scan is actually useful on SW.

        Pocket clip (Too small to call it a belt clip) is metal! It does keep it from falling out if you use it!

        Battery life seems pretty decent.

        And the bad/not so good:

        It will arrive totally dead, no charge at all in the battery. Hook up the USB cable and it will fire right up. I had a moment of “Oh no, it’s DOA!”

        Display is hard to read with old eyes. The modes and ATT indicators are very tiny. That little drawing of the display icons in the manual is also hard to read.

        The power button is pretty touchy, lock needs to be used. I had mine in the box, sitting on a table and my cat stepped on the box and I was awakened to 104.7 and a bad song.

        Encoder is the usual type that skips steps, and goes backwards sometimes. Again, NOT the worst of any radio I own, the worst is in my original “Malachite SDR” clone.

        The antenna is pretty flimsy on the top section. Don’t collapse the antenna with it, it will bend!

        The little instruction book seems complete, but in an odd format. At least it’s in English and seems to be written by someone whose English is their first language. In one section, it says,
        “Note: If there is strong radio interference, the signal reception will be messed up.”

        And it has the annoying five seconds to attempt to change a setting and then it goes back to it’s original setting thing. I had some problems early on with not being able to get a setting stored quickly enough.

        The painted finish seems like it won’t stay perfect for very long. Seems different from some of the pics, where it looks like the case is molded in a gray plastic.

        And IMHO, I really dislike the amber backlighting of the display, green would be preferable. Maybe a project in the future will be to change the LEDs in it.

        I managed to lock it up once, I was trying to set the time and it seemed to go into a sort of catatonic state. I pulled the battery for 30 seconds and all was well.

        I don’t really care about Airband, but I let it scan through on “DX”, and heard several planes talking to ground stations. I had no problems on SW SSB, but it does need a few feet of wire plugged into the external antenna jack to hear much of anything other than really strong stations on SW. AM BC is tolerable with the built in antenna, the tinny speaker actually makes speech better than it is on most of my other cheap radios. Of course, you have to move it around to find the best reception. It’s not the worst AM BC receiver that I own. FM on it is pretty good, no real complaints, it works fine and on headphones, sounds very good.

        In conclusion, I don’t think it’s much worse of a receiver than the Tecsun 365/County Comm SSB clones. Seems very similar, with more coverage. Nice to put in the little pouch they give you with it and put it into your pocket. Is it worth $53? Probably not to most people, but if you like tiny electronics, it might be to you.

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  7. Mike Murray

    I just bought the HRD 747 off Ebay UK for about £60. Amazing little device.
    I am currently comparing the results of this radio with the SW and SSB results I achieve on the XHData 808.
    So far, the HRD 747 compares favourably.
    I have picked up more SW stations on the HRD 747 than on the XHData D-808 on auto-scan.
    The the HRD 747 is more comparable maybe to the Tecsun PL-330 scan wise.
    The speaker is a bit tinny as you would expect, but you knew that already. What do you expect on a receiver that size? But it’s listenable, even for music on FM.
    Basically this radio is a near full sweep of 520KHZ to 550 MHZ. Some achievement for a radio this size.
    I remember my lecturer in the University lab 30 years ago showing off all his professional Marconi, Icom, Kenwood and Yaesu receivers in the lab and this tiny radio can do much more that these old radios.
    If I was designing it, I would have included Long Wave just to be completist, but that’s just me.

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    1. K.U.

      Which bandwidth did you use in your D-808 while scanning? This does have an effect on the number of found stations. This happens because signal to noise ratio is higher at narrower bandwidth and XHDATA D-808 includes a station to its search results if certain signal to noise threshold is exceeded. Hint: follow the signal to noise ratio indicator in D-808 while scanning!

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      1. Michael Murray

        Good point KU.
        But the difference is the Tecsun and HRD 747 do it out of the box. No need for bandwidth adjustment before scanning.

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  8. Paul JAMET

    I asked to Weilian Yang [HaRongDa in Shenzhen City] “chinaszhrd”
    Do you know when this receiver will be sold by Aliexpress?

    I received today this answer:

    ===> It will be available around the beginning of August

    I don’t know the price yet

    Reply ↓
  10. James Tedford

    For some reason, when I saw this strory, instead of “Han-RongDa” my brain says “Bha-Ram-You” I’m pretty sure this is just me.

    Reply ↓

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