KB2GOM
Active Member
To paraphrase Ratty from Wind in the Willows: " “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing–absolutely nothing–half so much worth doing as simply messing about with radios.”
That is precisely what I was doing just a few minutes ago . . . messing, simply messing about with the CCrane Skywave SSB.
Just above the LIGHT button is some lettering: "ATS." Not having noticed it before, I looked it up in the manual. It stands of Automatic Tuning System, and the manual says this about it:
"This feature programs all receivable stations in the AM, FM, Air and Shortwave bands to memory buttons. To use ATS, select your desired band: AM, FM, Air or Shortwave, and press and hold the ATS button for two seconds. The CCrane Skywave SSB will scan the entire band and automatically set all available stations in sequence 1-20. If more than stations are available, then the remaining stations will be preset to the next memory page, and so on."
So I tried it; I punched in a shortwave frequency -- 9250 -- and pressed and held the ATS button for two seconds. The Skywave then muted itself and went to the bottom of the shortwave bands -- 2300 -- and started silently scanning through the shortwave bands. Occasionally it would stop and silently store a frequency. After a while it stopped' I checked the memories that were stored and -- sonofagun! -- there were stations stored at each memory. Some of them were really faint, and I had to mess with single sideband and bandwidths to make them fully copyable, but they were there, automatically scanned and stored by the CCrane Skywave SSB.
Well, I thought, would it do it also for Air frequencies? Short answer: it certainly will.
There is one downside to the ATS function. When the the Skywave scans and stores stations, it does so starting at Page 1, Memory 1 of the memory, system . . . always. So, if you scan the Shortwave frequencies and store frequencies they will be stored starting at Page 1, Memory 1, wiping out anything that you have already stored there. If you then use ATS on the Air band, it will then write over whatever you stored from the Shortwave frequencies. I wish there were a way for the user to designate at which page in the memory system ATS will begin storing frequencies.
However, there is another trick the Skywave will do: if you have used ATS to scan and store Air frequencies in Page 1 of the memory system (which it does automatically), you can then press and hold the UP and DOWN buttons at the same time, the Skywave will then scan through the Air frequencies that are stored there. Further, there is a squelch function on the Skywave that works only on the Air frequencies. So, with a little persuasion (very little), the CCrane Skywave turns itself into a civilian air scanner.
If you have a CCrane Skywave SSB, give the ATS function a try; it's pretty slick.
That is precisely what I was doing just a few minutes ago . . . messing, simply messing about with the CCrane Skywave SSB.
Just above the LIGHT button is some lettering: "ATS." Not having noticed it before, I looked it up in the manual. It stands of Automatic Tuning System, and the manual says this about it:
"This feature programs all receivable stations in the AM, FM, Air and Shortwave bands to memory buttons. To use ATS, select your desired band: AM, FM, Air or Shortwave, and press and hold the ATS button for two seconds. The CCrane Skywave SSB will scan the entire band and automatically set all available stations in sequence 1-20. If more than stations are available, then the remaining stations will be preset to the next memory page, and so on."
So I tried it; I punched in a shortwave frequency -- 9250 -- and pressed and held the ATS button for two seconds. The Skywave then muted itself and went to the bottom of the shortwave bands -- 2300 -- and started silently scanning through the shortwave bands. Occasionally it would stop and silently store a frequency. After a while it stopped' I checked the memories that were stored and -- sonofagun! -- there were stations stored at each memory. Some of them were really faint, and I had to mess with single sideband and bandwidths to make them fully copyable, but they were there, automatically scanned and stored by the CCrane Skywave SSB.
Well, I thought, would it do it also for Air frequencies? Short answer: it certainly will.
There is one downside to the ATS function. When the the Skywave scans and stores stations, it does so starting at Page 1, Memory 1 of the memory, system . . . always. So, if you scan the Shortwave frequencies and store frequencies they will be stored starting at Page 1, Memory 1, wiping out anything that you have already stored there. If you then use ATS on the Air band, it will then write over whatever you stored from the Shortwave frequencies. I wish there were a way for the user to designate at which page in the memory system ATS will begin storing frequencies.
However, there is another trick the Skywave will do: if you have used ATS to scan and store Air frequencies in Page 1 of the memory system (which it does automatically), you can then press and hold the UP and DOWN buttons at the same time, the Skywave will then scan through the Air frequencies that are stored there. Further, there is a squelch function on the Skywave that works only on the Air frequencies. So, with a little persuasion (very little), the CCrane Skywave turns itself into a civilian air scanner.
If you have a CCrane Skywave SSB, give the ATS function a try; it's pretty slick.
