C. Crane CCRadio 3 Portable Digital Radio

Wonderful AM/FM Portable Radio

Speaking as a guy who has loved radios forever, I purchased the original Sangean CCRadio way back in the Art Bell days. I'm happy to say that is it working, as is the 2E, the focus of this review. The 2E is a vast technical improvement over the original with the addition of the twin coil ferrite loop and more informative (and much brighter) display. The 2E is very sensitive on both AM and FM.

My original Sangean CCRadio has developed problems with the top mounted buttons, often pushing the button will result in something unrelated to a memory channel. Also, the tuning knob has become intermittent. Fortunately, the 2E has not developed the same problems. However, if you live in a dusty area, it may be a good idea to cover it when not in use.

I've owned the 2E for nearly eight years, and by my experience I can recommend it.

However, it's 2026 and we haven't seen an update from C. Crane for quite a while. Here's an idea for C. Crane CEO Jessica Crotty, if you're listening:

Looking at the photo, you can see a tiny QODOSEN DX-286, which uses the powerful TEF6686 automotive chip. The little '286 is a receiving marvel. Combining the functionality of the TEF6686 chip (variable selectivity, etc) used by the QUDOSEN in a form factor similar to that of the 2E including that wonderful twin coil antenna and current fantastic audio would not only offer something not currently on the market, but would be a dream portable for many, including myself.

Bruce, N7BWB

Loose part

Good little radio.

The dial indicator cover wasn’t attached.

Exceeded my expectations for a weather radio!

I haven’t stretched all its legs yet, but I am pleasantly surprised how much I like this little guy. Hemmed and hawed over weather radios for a long time till this caught my eye. Hand crank power, flashlight and weather channels, check. Bonus Bluetooth, solar as well as AA battery power, and surprisingly good sound for such a light weight little thing. And, it’s so darn cute I want to name it, put it in my pocket and take it wherever I go!

Nice job Ccrane, somebody put some love into this one. It won’t be sitting in a closet, that’s for sure!

0:17

Jason Krastein

March 30, 2025

Poorly made

Antena broke off within 6 weeks

It’s big

I wasn’t expecting this radio to be as big as it is. I also have the smaller version(AA batteries) I’ve had forever. With my recent power outage, my Ccrane was pretty much my lifeline until I had to evacuate because of the fires.

This one is built just as strong(D Batteries so now I stock up on AA & D batteries)

Also, when my power went out, my radio worked perfect without all the interference of all my other electronics on.

Definitely recommend this radio. Now I keep my mini in the kitchen and this bad boy in my room.

** Also, from almost losing $1.5k of food in my back up freezer I bought the Ecoflow delta pro 3 battery charger. When I save up a little more $$ I will get the back up smart battery.

A solid investment ✌🏻

David J. Hemphill

December 4, 2024

The Little White Brick That Could

I just got my new C. Crane CCRadio Solar BT in the mail and am in love with it after only an hour. As much as I appreciate being able to stream Coast to Coast AM on WOC 1420 online via iHeartRadio, being able to tune in anytime anywhere is so exciting to me. No more internet bandwidth used for tuning in! This little radio is only about the size of a brick, but don't let that fool you... It has a built-in rechargeable battery, hand crank, solar panel, flashlight, stereo aux in and out, USB power out, Bluetooth, and tunes into AM, FM, and WX bands. Audio is powerful and clear for its size. My only regret? Not buying this sooner!

Good with minor flaws

This radio replaces my old Radio

Shack extended range reciever. I am a talk radio fan with tintinnitus, so I require a clean sound.

I liked the multiple channels. I really appreciate the ability to set up weather alerts in the background.

I was disappointed with the squelch or static at my desired frequency. That was solved by the Terk onmi-directional indoor AM antenna. At this price point, I expected the performance I now have without the Terk.

A great multi-band radio…but ONLY with an external antenna

Right off the bat, let me say that this review and my rating of 4 stars is based on using the radio with an external antenna wire plugged in. Without using an external antenna this radio goes down to 1 star, maybe 2 stars at best. The difference is night and day and there really is no point in doing a review without the antenna (I’ve uploaded a video showing the difference with or without the external antenna on multiple bands). So, with that being said, here’s my review.

OVERALL

The C. Crane Skywave 2 is a tiny tiny radio. Not much bigger than a pack of cards (see my picture). I’m absolutely blown away by the engineering that went into putting all of these features into such a little radio. FM, AM (Medium Wave), Shortwave, Weather, and Air Band with multiple bandwidths (5 on shortwave!). However, the compromise for all of these features is the fact that reception with the built-in whip antenna is at best not very good and at worst useless (except for AM - that antenna is built in). It’s only when you plug in an external antenna that the radio really comes into its own. I used an 18’ antenna wire that came with another radio. I’ve seen lots of reviews where they recommend a 30-100’ cable, but the 18’ one I used worked just fine.

SPEAKER AND HEADPHONES

For being in such a tiny case, the speaker is not bad. Obviously it doesn’t have deep rich bass and it’s not going to blast your ears off, but for what it is, it’s very listenable. The sound is pretty good to great through headphones (while listening to an FM classical music station I plugged in my computer’s external speakers and it sounded fantastic). The included earbuds have great deep rich bass-filled sound...but only if you push them deep into your ear, and I was too nervous to keep them in my ear that deep, so I’m using other headphones.

SHORTWAVE

I compared the C. Crane side by side with a Tecsun PL-660 on every band that they have in common (the PL-660 doesn’t have Weather).

On shortwave, the C. Crane picked up every signal that the PL-660 got. However, it was a little noisier, a little less able to pull weaker signals out from the noise. The C. Crane just does not have enough tools to tease out weaker signals; all you have are the tone and bandwidth settings. So this is not a radio for serious shortwave DXers (pursuing distant and weak signals), but overall it’s pretty good. The band scan feature doesn’t get all of the stations that are audible, but it does a pretty good job of finding most of them, even many of the weaker ones. The tuning is easy with the tuning wheel or buttons, although I find the action of the wheel a little stiffer than I care for. I do really like the fact that you can push in the tuning wheel to very quickly switch between fast and slow tuning. And I have to point out again how impressed I am that there are 5 bandwidth settings on shortwave (1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 kHz), which is more than any shortwave radio I’ve ever owned, and I've been using shortwave radios since the 80's.

AM (MEDIUM WAVE)

Really solid performance. This is the one band where the built-in ferrite rod antenna works really well as-is. I couldn’t find anything to complain about on AM, it really works well.

FM

Great reception. It picks up weak stations pretty well. Nice sound, especially through headphones where you can hear the stereo.

AIR BAND

A little more background noise than my Tecsun, but performance is pretty good overall. The band scan isn’t super helpful on this band since someone has to be actively talking for the scan to stop. But once you learn which frequencies your local airport uses most, you can just save them in memory.

WEATHER

This works great. Strong signal even with the built-in whip antenna (but that could just be that I’m very close to a transmitter site). The one feature I tried that’s a little weird is the Weather Alert. As soon as I turned on the alert (with the radio off), the radio started making a popping sound through the speakers every few seconds, regularly like a clock, while the backlight on the display turned on and off. The flashing display is on purpose when the weather alert is on (although it's gotta run down the batteries), but the popping sound must be a glitch in the radio, it's super annoying. And if you turned down the volume to get rid of the pops, then when there's actually a weather alert, you won't be able to hear it.

CONCLUSION

I really love this little radio. I’m continually amazed at how much it does for how small it is. It is SO tiny. Over the years I’ve had some of these super small mini portable radios and all of them were larger than the C. Crane, none of them had half the features of the C. Crane, and most of them were basically little more than toys. So the fact that the C. Crane can do what it does at the size it is will impress me forever. If I’m doing any sort of serious DXing on shortwave or listening to music on FM I will probably use my Tecsun, but for everyday casual listening the C. Crane is great (and so incredibly portable!).

Of course, the elephant in the room is that it needs an external antenna to be an effective radio. Many radios, even very cheap radios, include an external antenna wire with the radio, so the fact that the Skywave 2 doesn’t have this is curious, especially since I think the radio is a smidge pricey for what it is. If anyone at C. Crane is reading this, skip the earbuds and include an external antenna.

0:41

Florida Man

July 22, 2024

All Great Except for Air Band

This radio is very nice in all aspects, except for one: the aviation band reception. I live very close to a very large airport. I have other air band radios and I can get crystal clear reception right where I tested this radio. I took a short clip of what the radio sounds like, tuned in as exact as possible. Garbled and full of static. Now, if this was an add-in feature, that was on another radio that specialized in some other function, I might overlook this and give only a half star off for this lack of reception quality. Because this radio has the name Skywave, however, and makes claims about VHF Aviation Band reception right in the product headline, I'm going to ding them a full star.

Four Star Multi-band Radio that Falls Short on Aviation Bands

0:02

Lightning

July 15, 2024

Disappointed

I was very exited to test out this radio, it looked Good on the product page and I loved that it had airband so I could listen to aviation channels, unfortunately when I got it I was very disappointed, first the build quality was not good and felt pretty cheap, it had microUSB instead of Type C, signal reception was not good, and was not intuitive to use

Overall I'm pretty disappointed with this radio and I can't recommend it especially for this price

Great reception!

I have many SW capable radios and they all can pick up some SW stations if I work at it. This radio by far, beats them all. It is very sensitive in all the frequency bands. It is my first radio with air band that actually picked up stations. Also, the weather band is so sensitive outside it picked up several out of the area WB broad cast, not just my local one. The SW wave band also works well but there is an oddity when I scan. It seems to skip over/jump frequencies like going from 4 MHz jumping to 5 MHz without scanning the in-between frequencies. Not sure if it's supposed to but I can manually scan that range. I also love the simple format on the screen.

0:52

everything except the speaker is dang nice

good reception. ive picked up some two meter indoors for fun. i use this as my daily alarm clock. the alarm tone program is wonderful. i have a hard time waking up and im so impressed by this seemingly secondary feature. weight is good for the size. i like the build quality . the antenna isnt the easiest to extend. gotta use my fingernail which seems wrong but it still works. bluetooth pairing is automatic to my source (iphone) everytime i need it and quickly. for the price, i cant get over the distortion on the speaker. this thing gets fuzzy highs so easily when im playing bluetooth. . bluetooth music is actually not a good experience if your music is loud, harmonically dense. this is for talk radio through and through. if you're listening to a 40s music recording you probably wont notice? audio technology can do so much better than this and at $200 it needs to be punching at the $70 BT speaker catagory in my opinion. i dont have a 4 D cell speaker to compare but my only hope is that the audio is compromised in the name of battery life, which is very good on the ccradio 3

1:48

Good Sound but with strange noises at times in AM

Bought this radio to supplement my old Sangean CCRadio that is over 24 years old, the late Art Bell advertised this radio and a photo of him is on the box. This radio still works well after all these years. Sangean does not make it anymore, but CCrane does. The first CCrane CCRadio2E I received the front speaker grill was bent and not fully installed. This was a factory defect since the box was not damaged, so I returned it and purchased another. The second CCRadio2E I received does not have any visual physical defects like the first one. I have had the this radio for over 3 weeks so when comparing it to my old radio I can say it does sounds better, but it snaps and makes funny noises at times, It does this more if the signal is weak, I called CCrane and was told it was the DSP (Digital Signal Processor) and that can happen. I found this to be very annoying, since my old radio did not do this. I personally can not afford to have a expensive radio fail in that short of time so I returned the radio. I just did not feel confident in that I would get reliable service from this radio. I am going to look for a Sangean radio since I have had such good service from my old radio. I have attached a photo of my old Art Bell Sangean CCRadio.

$200 MISTAKE !

I got the C. Crane CCRadio 3 to replace my Sangean PR-D5 because the digital display is fading away on the Sangean !

THE OLD Sangean PR-D5 is BETTER than the C.Crane 3 even if the display is fading!

I keep getting interference and static even on the same local AM stations with the C Crane BUT NOT WITH THE Sangean, even when both radio's are at the same location and plugged into the same outlet!

I made a $200 mistake on the C Crane cause the Sangean at less than half the price is BETTER.

DO NOT BUY THE C CRANE

The Sangean PR-D5 is better and has better sound quality, better long range reception and NO STATIC !

5 star radio, best of the best!

This radios fit and finish is top notch! Very solid and heavy for its size. Reception is the best of any radio made today. This little gem pulls in stations from all over, with ease! FM is excellent, top notch and AM is the best i have ever seen. I would put this radio up against anything its size and honestly it beats radios that are bigger. Sound is also top notch due to really good bass and treble controls. Music sounds great and voice content is perfect. If you want the best am/fm on the market, this is the winner, hands down!

Excellent sound. Poor button design.

I have owned two of these. I attach it to my TV and don't need to wear hearing aids to understand every word spoken. This is better than any center speaker because it is tuned to the human voice. The music doesn't overwhelm the voice. This alone is worth the price of admission. So why the low review? There comes a point where the on off switch (and others) appear to stop working. This happened on both of my units. I wrote the company and was told the switches are of a very high quality. Turns out they are right. So what goes wrong? I took one apart and found out. The buttons you push are poorly made. You can't see it from the picture but there is a little nib on the bottom of the buttons that activate the switches. This nib breaks. At first the nib is half broken and you can activate the switch by pressing harder. However, once the nib breaks of completely there is only one thing you can do - open the unit and remove the button. Then you can press on the switch directly and it works perfectly. I tried to tell ccrane this but was ignored. I am hoping others will read this and call them. They are very nice to talk to. If enough of us call ccrane may change the design. I would happily but another if this were redesigned.

Poor build quality. Tuning button failed.

I have a lot of radios old and new. No radio has given me immediate disappointment like this one. I had high hopes when I bought it since it is my first C Crane radio and I was hoping that an American company, though it outsources the manufacturing of its products overseas, would have American quality standards. It wasn't the case with this radio. One of the tuning buttons, after a few days of casual use, just failed in a very strange way; the plastic supporters or whatever they are called. just broke and the button fell inside the radio. I was careful in my handling of ll the buttons after reading some reviews about the buttons issues on this radio but hey, a bad quality is a bad quality. This radio is not cheap. I have radios ranging from 20 dollars up 500 dollars. None of them failed as soon as this one.

Indestructible Radio

Bought one of these 20 years ago for my mom. She used it constantly for many years until she passed away. Great sound. I have had it sitting outside on my deck for years now thru rain and snow and hail. Still sounds great. Digital screen is gone and the volume control scratchy while adjusting volume. I am amazed at the durability of this radio.

I would say my reception has been slightly better than a $7 am radio since spending $$ on ...

Sitting by the pool in Walnut Creek, 20 miles outside of SF trying to listen to the Giants game on KNBR, SF radio statiion, and one of the biggest AM radio stations in California. I can hear the game somewhat if I hold the radio over my head, otherwise static. I would say my reception has been slightly better than a $7 am radio since spending $$ on this unit. The AM radio in my '74 Bronco is definitely a step up though.

Todd Huovinen

March 5, 2016

Excellent audio too

This radio could be considered the benchmark of portable AM radios. Excellent audio too.

Seems CC Radio has sacrificed reliability even more

I have one from 14 years ago, worked well but LCD display degraded over time until unreadable.

Brought the CCRadio-2E in mid 2014 for $150 as replacement, thinking 10+ years of usage on the first one was ok, that the display might have been a fluke degradement.

The replacement has the same exceptional sound and reception but after 2.5 years it suddenly developed a spontaneous reset problem where it would lose all the settings (clock, presets.) Warranty only covers 1 year. Attempting to get a fix from C Crane requires paying to ship it in for evaluation, potentially paying another $60+ dollars for a fix and paying to ship it back. CC Radio is now on my banned for life brand list along with a 'non-purchase from' C Crane store/seller as much as feasible.

Picture shows what the screen defaults to after an hour or two.

Unfortunate that it develops this degradement around the LCD device.