Review: Deepelec DP-666 radio receiver

I blame radio’s Steve Martin (not that one) for this.

I’ve been looking for a little travel radio for a while now. I’d like something with FM/AM/SW and ideally DAB and HD (this sadly has neither); I’d like some RDS as well, so I know what I’ve tuned into. I’d like it to be small and charge off USB-C.

I mentioned this on BlueSky, and radio’s Steve Martin (that one, but not that one) responded and recommended me this one. He said it had “quite a few geeky settings”, or words to that effect. He wasn’t wrong.

It’s about £55, or about AUD $108, from Ali Express, where I bought it.

The Deepelec DP-666 radio is based on an NXP TEF6686 chip, which is a software-controlled radio. It comes in a little carry case, with a screw-in FM antenna, and a USB-C charging cable.

And, my goodness, it’s geeky.

Above, you can see it tuned in to TripleM. I’ve a nice strong signal (67.1 dBμV) - that’s the “S” indicator - and the “M” indicator is the modulation of the audio.

What’s not visible here is that the screen is a touchscreen, and pressing different elements of the screen will turn on certain things. So, this is a stereo radio station (obviously), but I’ve told it to not bother decoding the stereo bit, by touching the stereo signal indicator to turn it into mono (the blue circle top left).

As you can see above, the radio has all the bands - lots of the short-waves; LW and AM; and even L-band FM (again, empty here). You can control almost everything you’d want - the de-emphasis for FM, the step and the bandwidth for AM, all kinds of things.

Tuned in to ABC Radio Brisbane on MW, it behaves OK. It only has a telescopic antenna - and I suspect for better MW reception you probably want a proper AM antenna, but it works fine for all the AM stations I’d expect to listen to. It suffers a little from some whistly interference from somewhere, but given that my house may have a few microprocessors in it, it’s not doing badly.

Touching the RDS icon on screen gives you an extended FM RDS screen, with lots of additional information. 4ZZZ uses FM RDS very nicely, with dynamic PTY for each program (though it does occasionally have a little fun, deliberately setting heavy rock shows as “easy listening”). There’s no EON or RT+ being broadcast on 4ZZZ though (B105 and TripleM do broadcast RT+, but it’s just blank). It would support AF (alternative frequency) and, if I turned the feature on, it would even switch to the best signal.

The FM receiver in this thing is incredibly sensitive. It’s picking up all kinds of stations here, which I’ve not received before on other FM tuners - many from the Gold Coast and further away, most with full RDS. It’s a very good FM receiver indeed: and the additional information on the big screen is very nice indeed.

I listened in Canada to CBC Radio 1 Calgary, where it worked excellently. It sounds just as fine as a little portable radio will - with a surprisingly decent speaker.

There is a headphone socket to the side, and a full physical power switch underneath. The volume control and the tuning knob are both physical, and the tuning knob is also used to navigate through the menus.

You’ve probably noticed that the build is a bit unusual - the case is made out of the same material that PCBs are made from. I’m not sure how long-lasting this would be: it feels quite brittle. Perhaps that’s why it comes with a nicely padded travel case.

And, that’s not all.

The unit has Bluetooth inside (for a reason I don’t really understand - I can’t seem to pair to it or anything, and the manual doesn’t mention it other than acknowledge its existence).

But - the unit also has wifi inside, which is relatively easy to set up, and enables you to connect the unit to some open software called XDR-GTK which allows for controlling the radio from a computer. Using that software on a Mac required building it from source, which was surprisingly unpainful; and gives you access like this:

You can use this to switch stations and view RDS information - I couldn’t quite get it to tune into AM, but I’m sure it’s possible.

The USB-C port lets you charge the device (yes, you can also run the radio under USB-C power); and also is capable of communications. I don’t know what you can do with this other than use XDR-GTK (or a piece of software called RDS Spy).

Interestingly, the firmware I’m using (“Megatron Mod17”) on the device isn’t the official firmware (from March 2025) - instead, some folks worked out how to get both the buttons and the touchscreen working, and this new firmware is the one now installed when you buy it from Deepelec directly.

I believe that this radio receiver may also able to power one of the FMDX webservers. If you’ve not discovered these, they’re radio tuners plugged in to the internet, so you can just listen to the radio wherever you’d like. (It’s not very obvious when you try one - but you need to press the “play” button to hear the audio). It looks from the installation info as though you’ll need an always-connected computer plugged in directly to the receiver for this - some users have little Raspberry Pi devices set up.

The open source firmware for this chipset, the TEF6686, has been featured in RadioWorld magazine as well. The team, called FMDX, take donations.

What I was hoping is that this radio could also be used, somehow, to decode DAB. It can’t; but the RadioWorld article says that “Verhoeven has been working on developing a DAB+ tuner, as the TEF chip lacks DAB support”.

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that I would love to learn how I can help add DAB+ to this device, or something similar - because that would make this radio perfect.

(Later: I discover there is a separate DAB+ device using a different chipset. But, wouldn’t it be excellent if it was all in the one box?)