I’ve owned a number of radios over the years, but never one from Roberts. I’m aware of their reputation, however, for producing quality, but often pricey, radios.

Anyway, I like a radio in the bathroom. Not to look at but, having said that, not really to listen to. I just find the silence in a bathroom whilst getting ready in the morning a bit too, well, silent. So I stick the radio on. My little portable Sony FM radio has done me a great service for many years but, after much battering, it’s time for retirement (probably to my shed). With the switch-off of analogue radio potentially only a few years away it doesn’t make sense to buy anything but DAB. However, DAB radios are power hungry and, those that do come with battery options often require expensive specialist battery packs (yes, I’m looking at you Pure!) or needs lots of C size batteries.

After a bit of a search, I came across the Roberts ecologic 1. It’s a compact portable DAB radio which runs on just 4 x AA batteries. “ecologic” is in the name because it will also charge rechargable batteries – simply use NiMH batteries and plug in the mains when you need to recharge them – so need need for an extra charger.

The one I bought is white (black is also available). It’s a glossy plastic and the silver buttons are a soft plastic with the silver painted onto them (I can imagine this will wear off over time). There are 5 presets on the front for easy station access and a button lock switch on the side. The screen is relatively small but has a back-light. On the other side you have the mains and headphone sockets. It measures just 160(w) x 105(h) x 35(d) (mm) and weighs only 365g.

As well as DAB you also get RDS FM, which is a nice extra to have.

Switching it on for the first time, the ecologic 1 will automatically search and store all the available stations – within a matter of minutes you’re ready to go.

The box contains the radio, mains charger and manual and not much else. None-the-less, there’s quite a lot of packaging – most of it recyclable I’ll admit.

And there’s not a huge amount else to say.

So, let’s get the bad points out of the way…

• The speaker is quite small and the volume doesn’t go up very high. I would have preferred a little more bulk to the radio to have fitted in a larger speaker. However, sound quality is still good.
• There’s no easy way to see signal quality – you have to scroll around the display options to find it. On other DAB radios that I have there’s a permanent display at the top.
• The underside feet are moulded in the same hard plastic as the rest of the radio – some softer and more “non-slip” would have been preferable
• I had problems with the built-in charging facility. A flashing light becomes solid once the batteries are charged – I put in a set of flat rechargeable batteries and the light flashed for only a few minutes before displaying solidly. They certainly weren’t charged and the radio turned itself off after only a minute or so of use. In the end, I used my separate battery charger – it may be that they were charging but merely that the lights were indicating incorrectly.

However, let’s lighten this by pointing out this is a compact, good quality DAB radio at a good price. And it runs on rechargable AA batteries which is a real bonus.

Summary of Roberts ecologic 1

Compact, rechargeable, uses AA batteries, good quality and a good price. Just a few bug-bears reduces the score.

Reviewed by David Artiss on 6th September 2011.

Anyone over a certain age will remember Bush – founded in 1932 as Bush Radio, and manufacturer of many of the most classic radios of the past, they branched into all sorts of home electronics. These days they are more known as budget brand and in 2008 they were bought by Home Retail Group, the owners of Argos.

Although Argos now sell a LOT of Bush products, they are still available elsewhere.

I have a retro remake of a classic Bush radio as well as a more modern DAB radio. However, I’ve recently found a problem with the latter – the display, although lit, will not show anything. I’ve read the manual and it makes no mention of why this might happen. Although the radio is a good few years old (and well out of warranty) I’m loath to get rid of what is otherwise a perfectly good radio (and was quite expensive when I bought it). Maybe it’s a simple button press that will restore the screen?

Unfortunately, probably because of the buy-out by Home Retail Group none of Bush’s contact details (including website) work. So, I contacted Home Retail Group. They gave me the number of  their customer services, but they told me I needed to speak to Argos customer services. Speaking to them, I came across the following problems…

1. Unless it’s an Argos product (this may be, may not be) they’re not interested
2. They don’t support radios, even if it was bought from them
3. They don’t appear to realise that Bush is their own exclusive brand

As a result I got no-where.

Now, bearing in mind that Bush still sell radios, this begs the question as to where you get technical support? I certainly don’t know.

I contacted Home Retail Group about this last week but have yet to receive a reply.

While I was moving  something else happened – this site’s bandwidth limit was reached and the site went down. As you can imagine, I didn’t even notice.

My host is Memset who, I have to say, are superb. But you pay for that quality and I was already having to pay more than I was last year due to bandwidth increases (you pesky visitors keep coming here!). There’s only so much money you can throw at something though before you have to have a bit more of a radical re-think. So, I made the decision to move my hosting  to UK2 and one of their rather professional looking business packages. Bandwidth would no longer be an issue but, as is often the case with cheaper providers, the occasional downtime may be.

I pointed my domain (which is held at 1&1) to the UK2 servers and although my holding page was now appearing I couldn’t get FTP access. I raised a support request but didn’t hear anything until last night – it had taken some time for the IP changes to be propagated to their FTP server. This morning it was working so I uploaded the site but I was still getting the holding site. Another support request and they noticed that my site was pointing to the wrong IP. Now corrected, my site was live! Unfortunately I was getting server configuration errors – this was using an exact snapshot of the site as held by Memset.

Meantime, Memset had contacted me and I was in a position where I could double my bandwidth by paying just £1 extra a month.

By this time the decision was now easy. I have swapped my nameservers back to Memset and have cancelled my UK2 hosting – thankfully they have a 30 day money back guarantee.

Unfortunately, it comes with  a sting in its tail – they haven’t refunded me all my money. They have retained an administration fee for the free domain they provided me…

When you purchase the Business web hosting a free domain comes with it, because you are keeping the domain and cancelling the web hosting we have deducted the registration fee.

I’ve pointed out that they didn’t actually provide me with a new domain, I’d simply pointed my existing one to their nameservers at no cost to them. Eventually, they relented and paid me my full amount.

But, right now, I’m just happy to have the site working. Welcome back Memset!