Customer Reviews:
 Bad Radio; Expensive Charger November 28, 2004
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
Radio station seek mode using arrow did not work in one direction; station dial was erratic; label was put on cockeyed (sloppy quality control); not so hot reception with battery. Charger worked good. Exchanged radio for dual charger and pocketed the difference.
Dewalt dropped the ball November 4, 2004
18 out of 20 found this review helpful
I purchased the radio/charger for convenince. If your charging a battery forget about reception. If I could return it for no shippng cost, I would in a second. I still use a charger separately so I can listen to the radio. This is the first time I hated a DeWalt product. I'm using it as an expensive radio(poor quality sound) in my shop.
 Performance of Dewalt Worksite Radio Charger October 29, 2004
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
I thought the design was rather cool and had to check it out. I first compared the side by side in-store performance against the Bosch and Milwaukee at Home Depot. All were able to receive a number of FM stations, but only the DeWalt was able to receive local AM stations inside the store. Reception was not great, but it was there. At home, I found the radio had good AM and FM sensitivity. The AM selectivity is rather poor, however. Local stations are easily received 20 KHz above their broadcast frequency. This is particularly annoying at night, when there are a number of strong signals on adjacent channels.
The seek feature works well, always stopping at the correct frequency from either direction. The manual tuning knob has an annoying habit of sometimes skipping the frequency I want. I applaud Dewalt for the functional simplicity. Maybe twelve memories would be better than eight, but at least you can remember wrere you stored stations. Why have 20 or 30 memories when there are only a few stations worth listening to.
Sound quality is superb. There are no tone controls, but I feel the audio has a pleasing balance and frequency response as is.
I have not evaluated battery life, but other reviewers have been quite critcal of that issue. If Dewalt could tighten the AM bandwidth and reduce battery drain when the unit is not plugged in, this would be a great radio.
Dewalt, what were you thinking?! October 18, 2004
53 out of 62 found this review helpful
Dewalt, what were you thinking? This thing is way to expensive for a portable radio, and it's way too expensive for a charger, but maybe for the convenience of both together...... However it is severely limited as a portable radio. The batteries run down over the weekend when the thing is turned OFF. It's no good on a job site - at least not for very long. I'll put it in the shop and use it for a VERY expensive plug-in radio, but I have no Dewalt products in the shop so the charger is useless. Dewalt, I expected better from you. Don't get very far from your extension cord with this thing. Not recommended!
 Why am I the Power Manager? October 6, 2004
96 out of 103 found this review helpful
I must confess this was a bit of an impulse buy. I already owned theDC911 radio/charger, but had been driven crazy by the knob tuning, and really liked the idea of being able to keep my MP3 player with the unit.
When using the DC911, it's always been nice to just grab the radio, walk wherever you're going to work, and carry your music with you. There are plenty of times I know I don't need to recharge a battery, but just want to listen to my tunes while I work. The DC911 gave this to me, and would run seemingly forever before needing another charge. When I plugged it in, the battery charge was fast.
A worker friend had won the Milwaukee version of this product. The digital tuning was great. The presets were very convenient. The fact the Milwaukee product is not also a charger is brain dead. I looked forward to DeWalt catching up with the digital features, though. When the DC011 showed up, I gladly took the plunge.
What I have discovered after a month of use is that this radio is nothing short of frustrating from a feature standpoint. The digital tuning is convenient, but the presets have proven to be useless. Why? Because they are far too volatile. As another reviewer pointed out, the unit will exhaust a freshly charged DeWalt battery in 50 hours or less. What that means is that your radio will be dead if you leave it in your truck over Labor Day weekend, or even Monday morning if you were to unplug it early on Friday. To counter this, you find yourself consciously thinking about taking the NiCad battery out of the radio every time you put it away in your truck. Oh, but that it were that simple! After a week of doing just that, I found that the two AA batteries were now dead, safely taking my presets with them! I performed this test twice, not quite believing the first set of results. The silly thing is that the only thing the batteries are really trying to do while the unit is both turned off and unplugged is save the presets (why aren't they in a small chip of NVRAM?) and display the digital clock. Why that burns through a set of AA batteries in a week is beyond me.
What I find I have done is move from a nice unit (the DC911) that can be characterized as a portable radio that just happens to be a battery charger over to a frustrating unit (the DC011) that is a battery charger that just happens to be a radio. If you leave the unit plugged in at all - and I mean ALL - times, you have good functionality. If you unplug the unit for a short time, you have adequate functionality. If you unplug the unit for a weekend, you're going to be quite disappointed when you return to it on Monday.
My best recourse at this time is to just remove the AA batteries, forget the presets, totally ignore the clock (which most couldn't care less about, anyway), tune it manually when in use, and take the battery out of the unit when I turn it off and put it in the truck. I am now playing the role of power management for a product that has less power management complexities than laptops that have been managing this problem effectively for over a decade. Sadly, I expected better engineering from DeWalt than this.
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