The ATS-909 is the premiere AM/FM/shortwave radio from Sangean -- not exactly a household name, but a major force in worldband portables. It offers continuous coverage of the AM, FM and shortwave bands -- the last of which are often shortchanged by smaller portables. It also has a whopping 306-station memory, with 261 of the saved locations preprogrammed at the factory to cover the world's most popular shortwave frequencies. You can also manually program in 18 AM, 18 FM and 9 LW (long-wave) stations. This model includes RDS reception, which allows the radio to display station call letters and the time for any station that transmits an RDS signal. This radio offers five tuning methods: direct frequency input, auto scan, manual scan, memory recall and rotary dial. A full front-panel numeric keypad should make punching in station frequencies easy if that's your gig. The front panel hosts a fairly large liquid crystal display that displays tuning and operational information, with switchable backlighting. One of this high-end portable radio's more unusual tuning capabilities is its auto SW search function, which automatically selects the strongest shortwave station on each of 29 shortwave preset "pages." It'll also automatically search and preset all AM, FM, or longwave memories based upon the signal strength of the stations. The ATS-909 also operates as a fully functional clock complete with alarm. In fact, it can display the time in 42 world capitols, and features the company's Dual Time System. It allows the monitoring of UTC (Coordinated Universal Time, formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time), and any other time zone simultaneously. The alarm offers three individual timers, and a sleep timer adjustable from 10-90 minutes.Though the single speaker delivers mono, the radio does deliver FM stereo through the headphone jack. You can power this radio with four AA batteries or the included adapter. The ATS-909 also comes with an ANT-60 portable antenna and carrying pouch.This product is also available in White. Though the ATS-909 doesn't include the cassette recorder you'd get with the ATS-818ACS, it does have line-out and control jacks for recording radio programs to an outboard cassette deck. This allows you to program the recorder to turn on at three different times. -- NW