> I went with a sony icf-cs115ip dream machine. looking for tips on this unit if anyone has one. Got a great price on it at best buy. Thanks for all who sent their opinions
Almost every iPhone dock has a terrible radio section, regardless of manufacturer. Remember to hook up the AM loop antenna, or you won't get AM at all - the days of internal ferrite bar antennas are gone - that external thing IS the antenna and you won't get a thing on AM without it.
If you unwrap that FM wire antenna, you can overload the whole band and get images up and down it - unless you are in an isolated area.
If you have the iPhone docked while using the radio, especially AM - it will cause horrible interference. Don't do it! Undock the iPhone to use the radio.
Most radios now days - iPhone dock or not - are based on a single IC. You have a tuning capacitor (or varactor diodes for digital models), one very cheap ceramic filter IF for AM, another very cheap ceramic filter for FM - maybe a discriminator coil for FM detection depending on the chip, or a ceramic discriminator. The selectivity, therefore, will be as wide as a barn door - horrible for closely packed stations. But it will make AM stations sound great! Cheap cheap CHEAP Chinese junk! I've managed to repackage one of these horrible radios into something useful:
http://earmark.net/gesr/the_fake_sr.htm
so its not the IC that is the problem. It is the way manufacturers use them with inadequate components around them. If you like a few very strong local stations, then the cheap radios are adequate. If you are in far suburbs or rural locations, you would be better off with a separate radio like the CCradio-EP:
http://www.ccrane.com/radios/am-fm-radios/ccradio-ep.aspx
which is the real deal in terms of a usable radio in remote locations with demanding reception problems.
Docking stations? Both are presently used as clocks at my house. Once in a while a guest uses them to charge their iPhone. My daughter uses a Dr. Dre iPhone dock for sound - it doesn't even have a radio.
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