If you are looking for portable shortwave radios, you must make sure that the product you are looking for has all the features you will need. Here is a list of the things that you need to be looking out for.

Frequency Coverage

The shortwave frequencies are the frequencies that are present at the higher ranges of the AM band. The actual range is from 1700 kHz to 30 MHz. However, this entire range won’t be covered by your portable shortwave radio. Your transmissions lie somewhere between 540 KHz and 30 MHz. You will probably also find some radios that are as low in frequency as 150 KHz, but that’s the longwave region. However, if you are able to get such a radio, it will cover more frequencies for you, and hence more radio stations.

Bandwidth Selection

This is another thing that you need to consider. The selection is for the kind of bandwidth you want to tune in to. Most shortwave radios will have up to 5 bandwidths that you can select from, though the portable versions will have fewer options. The selectivity bandwidths will be between ‘wide’ and ‘narrow’ options. The narrow selectivity bandwidths count for minimal interference across frequencies, while the wider ones can have some subsequent frequencies overlapping with each other.

Station Modes

Most portable shortwave radios will have only AM modes. Actually, this mode is quite enough to give you a lot of options for tuning in to radio stations, but then you might want other modes as well, such as SSB and some specific modes such as aeronautical, ham and military modes. These will be needed only in special cases though. For the best part, if you get an AM mode with SSB, it would work great for you.

Display

Go for digital displays by all means. The display shows, among other things, the frequency that your radio is tuned in to. You need to have this if you want to use your radio with convenience. In some of the cheaper models, there will be the usual analog slider function, but that becomes difficult to adjust frequencies and you don’t even realize in most cases what the exact frequency you are tuning in to is. Digital portable shortwave radios are only slightly pricier than the analog versions, but they can give you a much better experience.

These are some of the factors that you have to consider when you are checking out options on portable shortwave options. Remember that the radios have to be convenient to use, and that’s apart from the great quality they must have. Another factor to look into is the price. However, if you are looking at options on the Internet, you already have the best prices that you can get.