The American Red Cross Axis Self-Powered Safety Hub with Weather Radio and USB Cell Phone Charger, ARCPT300W

Great medium size emergency radio. 3 way power supply. Easy to use with good sound quality. CONS: No preset station buttons. No solar panel for charging. PROS: Large strong metal crank handle for charging battery, very robust. Power level indicator. Great price on sale. Elton is a good radio maker. Most other reviewers on the mark with comments.

After reading some of the reviews, and having an iPhone, I needed something that would charge our iPhones. Hurricane Sandy gave us the realization that we could not charge them with our present Eton radios.I just got this radio and had it plugged in to my computer overnight. After about 12 hours, my battery pack has not taken a full charge. Perhaps I will need to turn it on and let the battery drop to zero, then recharge it. Perhaps one other thing to try. The manual says you can reset to factory condition by unplugging the rechargeable for 30 minutes. Will give that a try and update this afterwards.Update 1: I opened the back to unplug and reset to factory condition. Found the white connector had pulled out. It is keyed but does not appear to snap in place. Radio is once again charging and I will update later. Y2K's Law of Electrical - 90% of all electrical problems are connector related (from years of experience <grin>)2nd update: The radio has now been plugged in 24 hours with the battery connector fully inserted. The battery indicator shows three bars but the LED has still not changed from red to green. So, I simply don't know if the radio is fully charged or not. I wonder if no one from Eton reads these posts and provide some guidance?3rd Update (sorry for all the updates but this one is the most important!): If you are charging the radio, as in plugged into your computer or ac adapter, the charging LED WILL STAY RED as long as you are plugged in! If you push DYN and see three red bars on the display, unplug the radio from the computer or ac adapter. If fully charged, the LED will turn green as mine did. That's a bad design Eton! C'mon engineers, you can do better than that. The LED should turn green when the battery is fully charged, regardless of whether you are plugged in or not. I next tried to charge an iPod with the unit. My iPhone was fully charged at the time. Remember that the radio was (supposedly) fully charged since the LED was now green. As soon as I plugged the iPod in and hit the cell button per the instructions, the battery display immediately dropped the top bar and now showed only two bars. According to the Eton instructions, there is a safety circuit that will prevent cell phone charging when the unit gets to a certain battery level. So, if charging has occurred or not, only time will tell. I will leave the iPod plugged in and post later on the charging process. The radio appears to play fine, the crank works, I'm used to the FM extendable antennas from the other radios, and I like the having the USB cord. Probably would have been nice to use the top handle as a place to store that cord, eh? So, only 3 stars so far. There's a lot of things Eton could have done better to make this a really decent radio, including the instructions. I'm not a person who gives 5 stars out of the box. I want to see that a product does what it says it does. I'll update later on the iPod charging experiment.Final update: To test the charging of an iPhone from a fully charged radio, I let my iPod 4G drop to 20% of battery left. For you iPod owners, that's when the battery shows red instead of green and you get a warning message. I then plugged the fully charged radio into the iPod and, sure enough, the battery took a charge. It obviously did not take a full charge but rather raised the level to about 1/4 as indicated by the battery display. So, the radio does what it says it does. Documentation needs some help but I will now upgrade my rating to 4 stars. Still needs some work. Hopefully I will never need it again like through Hurricane Sandy. I'm satisfied that the radio will do it's job in an emergency.Y2K

Mine came with a dead battery, that aside, I was not impressed with the rear panel covers that don't close because the charging plug was left in over night. I never got to test the "dump" feature in which you charge your phone from the internal battery. The radio performed well, but time did not display while listening. Time displays only when radio is off. White light was decent, but red blink light was pointless. Being able to have multiple power sources you can select from is the best thing about this. In an emergency, having two battery sources is nice. Too bad you cant charge your phone from the triple A batteries. Since the internal battery was bad on mine, that fact negated the emergency features for me, leaving me a battery powered radio that is just ok. I sent it back, and I'm still searching.

Didn't expect the Red Cross would endorse something this bad... guess they needed the money. I read a bunch of bad reviews on this item... beleive them! Yes you can crank it, but you have to do it like a mad man for 90 seconds to get 5 minutes of listening. In an emergency this is probably not a place to be waisting energy. It has rechargable batteries and regular batteries,,, BUT IT HAS NO "OFF". I figured I could at least store it charged up but NOOOOO, you have to pull the batteries and drain the rechargables what a piece of junk. Add to this, it is not water proof, you charge it with a USB cable (not provided) into a wall adapter or PC (also not provided). And all it takes is one slip and you break the hard telescoping antenna... Really this is suppose to be for emergencies!!!Then you expect to use the "ALERT" feature but with this feature on the batteries drain quickly... what a bad power design in whatever CPU is used to operate the "ALERT". But wait there is more, it doesn't have "SAME" recongnition or options so you get notified for stuff you don't want to get notified for and the darn thing doesn't shutup once activated.Look, I have had weather radios and thought I would get one with a few more features... it looked cool with the crank and flashlight but what joke this thing is... if you are depending on this thing to survive in a challenging emergency situation, get ready to meet your maker.I bought another Midland radio, it doesn't have a flashlight or crank... it does have backup batteries that work for a long time and I keep spares handy. It doesn't wake me up to warn me about a weekly test or heat advisory unless I program it too.Bottom Line, don't buy this item.