ATS Mini Controller
Radio + app

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.

Seek relies on the radio’s status feed. If it does nothing, the feed has probably been switched off, so press T to turn it back on. For a visual overview of where the activity is before you seek, try the Spectrum scanner.