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ATS Mini Controller
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Radio + appFinding stations1 min read

Seek: hands-free station search

Let the ATS Mini scan the band and stop on the next listenable station. How seek works in the app, its sensitivity thresholds, and the SSB limitation.

Rather than tuning click by click, seek scans the band for you and stops when it finds a station worth listening to. It is the quickest way to skim what is active right now.

How it works

Open the Seek panel, choose a direction, and the app steps through the current band watching the signal. It stops when both the strength (RSSI) and the quality (SNR) cross a threshold, so it skips dead air and weak noise and lands on something you can actually hear. If it goes all the way around the band without a hit, it stops on its own. You can cancel at any time, and the live frequency, RSSI and SNR are shown as it goes.

Adjusting sensitivity

The thresholds are tunable. The defaults are deliberately middle-of-the-road (a little stricter on AM than FM); lower them to stop on weaker stations, raise them to skip all but the strong ones. If seek runs right around the band and finds nothing, your thresholds may be too high for current conditions.

SSB is the exception

Seek works in FM and AM. It is not available in SSB, where stepping to a "next station" is not meaningful. Tune those bands manually with a fine step instead.

Recommended gear

Try it on your radio

Connect over USB or Bluetooth and follow along on the controller.

Open the controller

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Settings

Theme

Welcome to ATS Mini Controller

This web app connects to your ATS Mini radio over USB or Bluetooth LE and lets you control it directly from a computer or phone. It adds remote tuning, memory slot management, screenshot capture, audio streaming, spectrum scanning, theme editing and other features on top of the device's built-in firmware.

Firmware 2.34+: pick a connection method

Starting with firmware 2.34 the radio accepts remote control over USB or Bluetooth LE. Pick by what matters more for you: fast screenshots (USB) or clean audio from the radio’s 3.5 mm output (Bluetooth) — the two transports trade off in opposite directions.

  • USB Serial

    Settings USB Port change Off to Ad hoc

    Works in any Chromium-based browser. Requires a data-capable USB-C cable (opens in a new tab).

    Best for screenshots and theme work. Transfers complete in a second or two. Audio capture is noisy while the cable is connected — the radio lacks the filtering needed to isolate its 3.5 mm output from the USB power rail, so hum and switching noise bleed into the audio path.

  • Bluetooth LE

    Settings Bluetooth set mode to Ad hoc

    Chrome / Edge / Opera on desktop or Android. BLE is experimental in firmware 2.34.

    Best for clean audio. Bluetooth LE carries the remote control only, never sound: the audio still travels by cable from the radio’s 3.5 mm output to your computer. With no USB cable attached the radio runs on its battery, so that output stays free of the USB power-rail noise that bleeds through on a wired connection. Screenshots are much slower (~30 s) because of the firmware's BLE throughput cap.

More than one firmware

Besides the official firmware, the app carries profiles for the Monster fork and for H. J. Berndt's firmware. It works out which one your radio runs from the replies it gets, so there is nothing to pick. When nothing matches, it says so instead of guessing.

  • Berndt firmware is never assumed. It reuses some of the official firmware's keys and what they do there is not established, so the app asks you before switching to it.
  • Missing controls are deliberate. Whatever a firmware cannot do is left off the page rather than greyed out, and on Berndt firmware, commands go out one at a time, a few seconds apart.
How the app handles other firmwares (opens in a new tab)

Keyboard shortcuts

Single keys control the radio on the Controller page, except while you type in a field.

←→
Tune one step
↑↓
Volume up / down
Enter
OK
BN
Next / previous band
MV
Next / previous mode
SA
Next / previous step
WQ
Next / previous bandwidth
GF
AGC up / down
LK
Backlight up / down
IU
Calibration up / down
OP
Sleep on / off
T
Toggle status log
C
Screenshot
H
Log reception
D
Cockpit view
⌘K
Search pages & stations