(NEW) Eton Quest Hand Crank NOAA Weather Radio, All Band Emergency Radio

Initial observations: Good rugged appearance. Simple to use, intuitive knobs and buttons. I plugged in the battery, turned it on, tuned in a few AM and FM stations with no problems, switched to the NOAA band and verified that I could receive my local station with no problems. I tried out the flashlight and hand crank. I then cranked it for a few minutes to verify that the charging does work with the hand crank. I have not tried the tiny solar panel yet. Since it was displaying 2 out of 3 bars on the battery, I attached the included mini-B USB cable to a nearby charger and let it charge for a few hours. When I returned, it displayed full bars. I have not tested the runtime yet. Radio sensitivity seems fine, but I haven't tested any far away radio stations yet. Purchased 10-2023. The battery shows a mfg date of 2021. I noted that this can be charged by hand crank, solar panel, or USB only. If I interpreted the instructions correctly, it can also run the radio when the USB is plugged into an external source of power if the battery is dead. The radio is supposed to run for four minutes for every 1 minute of cranking. Downsides: The instruction manual is pretty sparse and a bit poorly written. They valued style over substance, and the print is extremely tiny. The battery uses a proprietary connector. It will require some soldering or cutting and crimping when it's time to replace it. (The battery is a single standard 18650 rechargeable.) This version of the radio lost a feature that I liked on the earlier radios. It no longer takes AA/AAA batteries as a backup in case the internal rechargeable battery fails. I consider that to be its largest shortcoming. For an emergency radio, you want to be able to run off of any source of power available. However, many people carry a USB power bank and it will run off of one of those for a good long while. It would have been nice if it had a standard 12V charging port (such as a 5521 jack) and a "wall wart" 110V adapter and a 12V cigarette lighter adapter to charge it. You can use the included USB cord, but they did not include the adapters to run it from your car or your home's 110V. We all have those things around, so no big deal. They've simplified the design and made it a bit cheaper, but the reliance on rechargeable batteries and USB is a bit unsettling for an emergency radio that won't get used much. For something like this that would be put into an emergency kit and not touched for years at a time, putting some AA/AAA lithium batteries in the box and forgetting about it would be fine. Instead, according to the instructions, you have to charge it every 3 months, or the battery life will be lessened. My plan is to leave it in a sunny location so that it will trickle charge on the solar panels. It would have been helpful to include a place to put the USB charging cable, since it is an uncommon USB Mini B (not Micro B). I will have to find a carrying case for it so that the cable doesn't get lost. Total fail on the part of the mfg... why did they make the jack the oddball size of USB Mini B? That hasn't been a standard in probably over a decade. Why not USB C? All in all, pretty solid so far. I am not detracting from the score for these shortcomings.