As the year 2024 winds down we had a warmer day (48°F) and I thought I’d head out to the yard on this cloudy Christmas afternoon for a quick band scan.
I use ATS scans on my radios quite a bit to find stations efficiently and then go through the stored memory locations to see what’s on. I have the idea that it saves time. But there are some gotchas with ATS scans besides the obvious problem that some radios have, storing more noise than stations (like my Tecsun PL-660). One of problem is that I have to be careful when scanning close to the hour or half hour; a station on the scan might have signed off by the time I try to listen to it, or another station might have signed on and I’ll miss it. A station might have faded in our out.
Today I’m not using ATS, but rather a different feature of the Qodosen DX-286, AUTO tuning mode. With AUTO mode it’s not necessary to do a band scan first — just tune the radio in AUTO mode and it will stop on the next station. There’s no problem missing a station that just signed on. The DX-286 has a setting to play the station for a set time and then go to the next, but I have set mine to just stop. The radio is silent when scanning, and all you hear is the station found. AUTO tuning can be done both with the tuning knob or the up and down buttons. While technically this is muting, the operator doesn’t perceive it that way. The perception is station, station, station….
I made a video of the scan here near Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. The radio was fed by my 20-foot wire up a tree (WUT) antenna. The scan started with CFRX, 6070 kHz in Toronto, Canada. Lower than that in the daytime doesn’t make much sense because not much is on and there is significant noise below that on shortwave where I live. The clock is set accurately for the video (patting myself on the back for remembering how to set the clock). I also used a tripod this time.
Skip to 2:35 for the stations (the first part just repeats the text above).