If you could provide a few more details ---- Radio Shack has a history of manufacturing cost-reduced re-designs of other company's radios. Somebody like GE has a great idea, it sells well, and presto- Radio Shack takes the concepts, and cost reduces the ____ out of it - hurting the sensitivity of the radio. But - in some cases - making a radio that can be modified to be almost as good as the other.
A good example is the GE Superadio 3. Varactor tuned, but the most sensitive radio in its price range I have ever seen. GE made a couple of goofs - a transistor badly biased that is noisy, and a tuning pot that drifts. Both are repairable, and the radio can be a fantastic radio. Radio Shack comes along - they copy the varactor tuned concept, but downsize the ferrite bar AM antenna, have only two IF stages instead of GE's four, etc. For somebody that has never owned a radio with a tuned RF stage, it is a fair performer out of the box. But for somebody who also owns a GE Superadio 3 that works properly - the GE wins hands down. Even if you add a larger ferrite bar antenna and an AM ceramic filter, the Radio Shack has an AVC that is wrong - I am still working on a fix for that. I know it can be fixed because C Crane uses the same IC and doesn't have the AVC problem - so it is an application problem with Radio Shack - they didn't apply the IC right. For more information on those radios:
http://www.earmark.net/gesr/. Scroll to the bottom for links to the Radio Shack 12-603.
All that said - I would be very wary of Radio Shack branded radios - unless you are a hobbyist who is willing to hack the hardware. But - they have recently been selling other manufacturers, so if you go in there and see a Sangean or some other brand, then you may be in luck.
