Gain: AGC, attenuator, AVC & soft mute

Gain controls decide how hard the receiver works on a signal. Most of the time the automatic system does the right thing. When it doesn’t, a booming local transmitter or a whisper at the noise floor, these are the controls that help.

AGC and the attenuator

AGC (automatic gain control) constantly adjusts the gain so loud and soft stations come out at a similar level. Leave it on for normal listening. Turn it off and you can dial in manual attenuation instead, deliberately reducing the front-end gain. That is the cure for a very strong local signal that overloads the receiver and throws distortion or "ghost" copies across the band. (Attenuation applies to AM and FM; it is not used in SSB.)

When to reach for attenuation

• A strong station distorting, or the same station appearing in several places? Add attenuation. This is common with active antennas and longwires, which feed the radio far more signal than the stock whip.
• Chasing something faint on a quiet band? Keep AGC on and the gain high.

AVC and soft mute (from the device menu)

Three more settings live in the radio’s own on-screen menu rather than as dedicated app buttons:

• AVC (automatic volume control) sets the ceiling on AM/SSB gain, handy when AGC pumps the between-words noise up too much.
• Soft mute quietens the audio on very weak AM/SSB signals to take the edge off the background hiss.
• A squelch, on recent firmware, can mute the audio entirely until a signal crosses a strength threshold.

You can reach all of these from the browser by driving the radio’s menus with the Left / OK / Right navigation buttons, exactly as you would with the encoder on the radio.