Given that our complete test would be conducted away from base the first thing we started with was the power supply to the DR301. Sure it runs on battery power but there is no rechargeable battery or power pack as with some models. Instead we loaded the Perstel with 3 x AA batteries, using a well known high capacity brand. The unit itself measures 108 × 61 × 27.3 mm and weights 140 grams without the batteries, styled in typical gadget silver and sporting the mandatory LCD backlit blue screen about the only surprising thing is the size of the screen at 2".

Power up the Perstel and send it off for that initial DAB search then soon you'll be able to trawl through the now burgeoning ranks of Dab radio stations on what turns out to be a very readable LCD screen, with 4 lines of text and symbols conveying all the information you could ask for. Alongside the station name and other key details stations like radio 5 live and talk sport broadcast data which scrolls across the lower lines a bit like a ticker on a TV news channel. Other stations use this feature to show the artist now playing of contact details in case you want to email them?

No email for us today sat in the local park at least not using the DR301 (perhaps someone will go that route soon) for now its a case of selecting a few stations to check out the all important audio quality and RF performance. Opting first for radio one the Perstel locks on strongly without any hint of signal problems, the text data springs to life and a surprisingly palatable sound emanates from the relatively small enclosure. Most DAB radios will use a speaker costing from 50p to maybe £5 at a push and we guess that the DR301 is somewhere in the middle of that range. The sound is pleasant if not overly convincing, its way better than your average FM radio but not quite up there with some of the portable units from Pure Digital.

Bass is present if not surrounding and this is probably more to do with the relatively small enclosure afforded to the speaker unit by the minimalist design of the radio. However the overall sound is more than acceptable for a portable radio as most people are trading in an FM radio that's seen one too many trips to the beech.

Not content with having a full DAB tuner and an FM back the Perstel DAB DR301 also packs a couple of top end features. As seen on the cutting edge DAB radios the 301 has a rewind feature where you can pause live radio and scroll back to hear something again, this weirdly is limited to just 1 minute as the audio for the rewind is stored internally in a fixed memory. This somewhat ruins the rewind idea as you can rewind as much as you like as long as its not more than one minute? It's a bit like the last meal cook on blackadder where you can have anything you like as long as its sausages, "cos sausages is all she's got!"

The mystery deepens still as the radio is equipped with an SD card slot which allows you to record live radio or to play pre stored MP3 or WAV files using the DR301's speaker. This feature seemed to have a mind of its own working fine on the supplied 128mb SD card but refusing to play ball when we used a 512mb SD card we had in the office. Reading the manual (yes we resorted to it) it does state that the unit should be able to use cards up to 1gb so we can't really find reason for this strange behaviour. Oh and we lost the silly little cover that sits over the SD slot on the top of the unit, its not attached to the radio and it is somewhere in the park even now.

Just as well then that the unit has a USB 1.0 connection though which we can apply the latest firmware version which we hoped may address this issue, it didn't, well not at least with our San Disk card. That part of the review was meant to be the positive part before we get onto battery life. Running on mains we'd never have found just how thirsty the Perstel unit is, on battery mode it managed to chew its way through 3 AA Duracell's in just under 4.5 hours (ouch). So there we were in a relay round to the corner shop to keep buying more batteries every few hours much to the delight of a bewildered shop keeper and by our calculations moderate use over the short British summer could cost you as much as the unit again in Duracell's.

One bright spark decided to use some rechargeables instead and although we can top these up again outside the unit they only gave us 2.5 hours playback on the weaker power provided.

This surely has to be a major flaw for a portable DAB radio? In FM mode it lasts much longer as expected, the DAB chipset is clearly very thirsty, but surely Perstel should have fitted a charge Pak or similar device for real useable portable listening.

Priced at a shade under £150 the spec sheet sounds like good value, what with recording, live rewind, portable use, MP3 playback, DAB and FM. However our tests really show that the record feature and rewind are both dogged by software issues and a piddling amount of internal memory. Combine this with a thirst for power and you soon forget that the sound was quite good and RF reception was also strong.

For this kind of money we expected a more useable product, so for now Pure digital seem to have this market all to themselves.

Published - 29/04/2006

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