SUNGLIFE Solar Crank NOAA Weather Radio Review

Originally posted 2019-09-08 14:57:49.

Communication is vital – especially in an emergency.  And as we’ve seen with recent horrifically destructive storms like Hurricane Dorian, it’s not out of the question to have the power to your home cut off for days or even weeks at a time.  That’s why it’s important to have a decent emergency radio as a consideration in your preparedness items.  Today, we’re going to look at the SUNGLIFE Solar Crank NOAA Weather Radio and see how it performs.

SUNGLIFE Solar Crank NOAA Weather Radio is a new comer on the Amazon market place, and if you’ve followed this site for a while you’ll know I have quite a collection of emergency hand crank radios at this point.

The SUNGLIFE Solar Crank NOAA Weather Radio has all the features you are going to want in an emergency radio, such as –

• AM, FM, And NOAA National weather radio bands
• Good volume output, you can get this radio to be pretty loud in case you need to listen in a windy or loud situation
• multiple ways to charge the device, including a wall plug in (USB), hand crank, or solar panel
• On board lithium ion battery that can be also switched over to AAA battery power
• The radio doubles as a power bank, allowing you to use the battery to charge your cell phones and other small electronic devices
• flashlight and reading lamp with bright LED bulbs
• A very loud SOS emergency signal / beacon – in case you are lost this very loud siren can help rescuers to locate you.

 

Upon opening the SUNGLIFE Solar Crank NOAA Weather Radio, there were a few features I liked right off the bat – the tuning dials are on the side, and this radio has the more traditional analog style tuner – so you can really see around where your radio band is and more accurately find stations as you scroll.  Another features I liked is the attached  lanyard, which also comes with a small clip – you can actually clip this to the front of the radio and hang the radio from somewhere to listen to it as you go about your activities.

As I mentioned above, tuning seems to be easier with these radios where there is a traditional analog tuner, so first I browsed to the local NOAA radio station and everything came in loud and clear (apparently it’s supposed to rain today!).  AM and FM channels were also plenty clear and I was impressed with the quality of the broadcast from such a small radio.

The flashlight feature on this radio is nice, but the flashlight isn’t super strong.  It would be enough to navigate your way in pitch darkness though.  More impressive than the flashlight portion would be  the reading lamp, which turns on automatically as you open the solar panel.  This is a a pretty bright LED array and would be super useful for reading or looking at a map or other information if the power got knocked out.

Now, my next big test was to see how well the charging functionality of this radio was – so I swapped out the included cable for my c-type USB cable, switched the mode to charging, and plugged in my cell phone (I used a Samsung S9 for this test)  I left the phone plugged in for approximately 30 minutes, in which time the charge on the phone raised from 48% to 58%.  So, roughly a 10% charge after 30 minutes.  While that’s not as fast as you’re going to get from your regular wall charger, this is still pretty impressive to me, as a 10% boost in charge is more than ample to make emergency calls and use the phone for a decent amount of time.  So it’s good to know this radio can get you back online in a pinch!

Charging the SUNGLIFE Solar Crank NOAA Weather Radio can be done in 3 ways – you can charge it via a USB wall charger by using the included micro USB cable, you can place the radio in the sun to utilize the solar array and charge it this way (although this way will be probably the slowest of all the methods since the solar panel is fairly small) or, you can manually crank the radio with your hand.  I find that it’s a lot more peace of mind to have multiple ways of powering a radio.  And, as a bonus, you can also switch from the onboard lithium ion battery to AAA batteries (not included) so if you want to convert some AAA power into your phone or other device, you can utilize disposable batteries in order to give your phone a boost.

Overall, I would say that the SUNGLIFE Solar Crank NOAA Weather Radio is a good starter choice for you if you’re looking to keep a basic multi function radio at hand.  It’s always important to be able to keep  up with weather forecasts and other information via radio in case the main electric is out in your home and you wind up in the dark.   This radio is priced competitively and won’t break the bank either, and I think for the price you get a decent amount of features and pretty good sound quality.  So, if you’re interested in checking this radio out, you can find a link to it here. 

SUNGLIFE also makes some really neat food dehydrating products, so you might want to check those out as well.

Happy camping!