Makita BMR100W: Discontinued — What to Buy Instead
An early LXT jobsite radio. Discontinued, and the current one charges batteries as well as playing them.
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The BMR100W was one of Makita’s earlier LXT jobsite radios: AM/FM, an auxiliary input, and the ability to run from an 18V LXT battery or from mains.
It is discontinued. As with every LXT tool, the battery mount has not changed, so current packs will run an old radio.
What the current one adds
The Makita XRM10, linked below, is the current equivalent and the changes are worth having.
Bluetooth. The aux socket on the old radio meant a cable running from a phone in your pocket to a radio on the bench, which is exactly as annoying as it sounds. Bluetooth removes it.
Battery charging. The XRM10 charges LXT and CXT packs as well as running from them. On site or in a shop with one power point, a device that is both radio and charger is one less thing plugged in.
CXT compatibility. It takes the 12V max CXT packs as well as 18V LXT, which is useful if you own both.
The thing people forget
Do not leave a battery in a radio. A radio drawing from a pack overnight, or over a weekend, discharges it deeply — and repeated deep discharge is one of the things that shortens a lithium pack’s life.
Run it from mains when mains is available and keep the battery for when it is not.
On listening in a shop
Worth saying, because this is a workshop site: a radio playing at a volume you can hear over a thicknesser means the thicknesser is loud enough to damage your hearing, and the radio is now adding to it.
Hearing protection with audio built in solves the problem properly. Music at machine volume through a speaker does not.