I have these receivers:

1. TechniSat TechniRadio1 (shitty amp/speaker quality)
2. Envivo Retro (shitty amp/speaker quality; antenna: 66cm)
3. Envivo PO-1585 (good amp/speaker quality; antenna: 90cm)

I won’t talk about receiver ① because it behaves the same as receiver ②. ② & ③ are the same brand but they behave differently. Envivo is perhaps just an Aldi rebranding from different makers.

② finds 101 signals but only “BBC WS” (World Service) from the BBC. Most importantly, it can tune BBC WS at any time.

③ finds 57 or 72 signals (probably depending on weather at the time of the scan). It always finds these BBC stations:

• BBC WS
• BBCAsian
• BBC R6M (radio 6 Music)
• BBC R5L (radio 5 Live)
• BBC R4Ex (radio 4 Extra)
• BBC R3
• BBC R2
• BBC R1
• BBC R1x (radio 1 Xtra)

③ cannot tune any of the BBC stations. It only finds them. Exceptionally, a couple floors above ground it tuned BBC WS, once. Apart from that one time, it either says “connecting…” indefinitately, or “service not available”.

WTF is going on here? It might be normal for one receiver to have a better tuner than another, but in this case one finds many more BBC stations but tunes none of them. We might speculate that the scanning algorithm of the radio that finds more stations just has a lower signal/quality threshold for what it accepts, but the one finding more BBC finds fewer stations overall.

It’s a shame that despite the invasion of the Internet of Shit (IoT), radio makers have not realised it would be greatly useful to be able to attach a radio to the LAN to access tuning info from a PC.

update

③ was bought 2nd hand. I scanned and rescanned many times. It kept finding many BBC stations that apparently do not exist. Then I did a factory reset and a purge (w/out really knowing what purge meant in the context it appeared). The new scan then yielded mostly the same stations as ②, but a subset thereof.

So I’m calling this a software defect in receiver ③. Scanning should not require a factory reset.