ATS-120 Receiver Teardown

In this video we take a look inside the ATS-120 receiver. I will describe the parts and components that make it up. You can find the previous review video here: • New SSB Pocket Receive...
#ats120 #teardown #receivers

[@lectrikdog]

I bought one of these today, should have it by the end of the month!😁

[@OM0ET]

I hope you will enjoy it ;)

[@wtmayhew]

Same here, but ordered about a week ago. I really like the convenient size and pretty good RF performance.

[@fotografm]

Excellent teardown !

[@stuwilson3146]

Great little Radio.. I've had mine for 3 days and haven't put it down since... Just found the Seek.. Quick double press on encoder..lol.. Great video.. Thankyou for sharing.. 🙂

[@Valentino-ok2hss]

Paradni video. Prave jsem se rozhodl si ATS120 pořídit. 73.

[@mrradio2187]

Looking forward to receiving my ATS-120, it's an amazing little radio!

[@wtmayhew]

If is amazing what the ATS-120 is able to do with so few components. Just think the size it would be if had been built in the 1970s, not to mention how much power it would consume!

[@Steve-GM0HUU]

Thanks for video Paul. It was nice to meet you on the air on 17m SSB today 👍.

[@OM0ET]

Yes Steve, thank you also for our QSO 👌😉

[@SangiTariq]

Great Radio great video

[@stevefox6864]

Good presentation thank you

[@HE9JSD]

Nice !

[@noslidemais]

show um ótimo video, parabéns

[@geraldoki2803]

Hi OM0ET, Thanks for the video. And also others videos you have made on the ATS-120They have been very instructive. I am wondering if the Telescopic Whip antenna is connected to the same points of the 3.5mm Jack on the circuit board which is used for the external antenna (SW,SSB,AM) I am thinking of removing the telescopic antenna and replacing it with SMA Female screwed to the top but soldered with wires back to the circuit board where the connections of the whip antenna is situated. The reason being I will love to use different antennas by just unscrewing them from the top via an SMA Male connector. Besides, I don’t seem to like the position of the 3.5mm connector of the antenna and would love to disregard it complexly. Please what are your thoughts? I know I can fix it but I just want to know the implications. Expecting your kind response please.

[@stanislavlukin1284]

Отлично! спасибо

[@wtmayhew]

Thank you! It looks like there is room for the ATS-120 to possibly do more functions than the current firmware. The ESP32-WROOM-32U already has both Wi-Fi and BLE 5.1 built in. Perhaps the designers went with the external BLE module so that the ESP32 would not need to spend CPU power to digitize audio. I am thinking it would be really neat to be able to control the ATS-120 with a desktop or mobile phone app over Wi-Fi. This circuit looks pretty close to the Lilygo ESP32 Dev Modules sitting on my desk or Arduino Uno R4, except with the addition of the Skyworks Si4732-A10 receiver chip already on board. All that extra circuitry is kind of interesting. Perhaps the mystery chip is an LNA and/or attenuator. The receiver chip already has an internal LDO, so I’m wondering why they need three discrete voltage regulators. For noise isolation? The receiver chip also has several more modes and bandwidth settings which are not exploited by the firmware. Over all the ATS-120 is a very interesting little radio. It may prove to be fairly hackable to add new capability. I am looking forward for the one I ordered to arrive within the next few weeks.

[@rawhides]

Hi there, what would be the best way to go about trying to dump the firmware so one could manually hack around with it? Would I just use the normal ESP tools (like you, I also have Lilygo modules all around my desk!)? With no need for BLE I thought it would be cool to replace the module with a LoRaWAN 915Mhz board and try to load a custom Meshtastic setup.

[@wtmayhew]

@@rawhides That sounds like a really cool idea to have Meshtastic right in the receiver. I don’t know how easy it might be to extract the firmware. I am fairly new to ESP32, so I don’t know if they can set a security bit to make it difficult to read. For ideas, I found several web sites with Si4732-A10 projects which look close but not identical to the ATS-120. Right now the ATS-120 I ordered is somewhere between China and US Customs. Anticipation!

[@f0aleksander]

ESP32 has 12-bit ADC. I think this is not a good idea to use it to transmit audio, especially in FM. But using his BLE for control is interesting idea

[@wtmayhew]

@@f0aleksander I agree.that the on-chip ESP32 A/D isn’t spectacular, at least not on the dev modules. If you don’t need resolution, the A/D can be short cycled with fewer bits. Just playing around I adapted an Arduino sketch to make a tiny triggered sweep oscilloscope on Lilygo board. It is neat, but with the Arduino IDE, my top sampling rate is a few KHz, and I can render about 25 sweeps/second at 700 points with the LVGL library. I’m sure someone more experienced could do better, but my project was just for fun.

[@UpinkProduction]

I love it good 👍

[@Landrew0]

I had a hard time installing the included lanyard through the tiny holes in the top plate.

[@Valentino-ok2hss]

Super video, přemýšlím nad možností dolu implementovat SMA konektor pro možnost připojení jakékoliv redukce pro ant. Co si o tom myslíte? 73!

[@Igor-cc6xy]

on the si4735 screen 9:39 and the chip on the si4732 8:24 board is a hoax?

[@Really2950]

The esp32 chip has bluetooth built in. No need for separate module. Developer missed that?

[@OM0ET]

it is an audio to Bluetooth converter if I am not wrong :)

[@Really2950]

@@OM0ET no. Its a microcontroller. Does lots of things. Has wifi and bluetooth capability

[@ominkan3129]

Does this have wifi and a cw decoder?

[@OM0ET]

Wifi yes, but no cw decoder. New FW and HW modification is required.

[@ominkan3129]

@OM0ET Thank you. Will you review the ATS 25 max decoder soon? Looking forward to your complete and excellent, every aspect review.

[@OM0ET]

Yes, the video is almost finished 😉👍

[@ominkan3129]

@@OM0ET very nice Thanks again.

[@ehsaananwaar]

دلچسپ اور معلوماتی، وڈیو کی مدد سے ریڈیو کے میں موجودہ components کے متعلق تجسس کو دور کیا جا سکتا ہے۔ جن کے پاس ATS120 ہے۔۔۔ انہیں اپنا ریڈیو کھول کر دیکھنے کی ضرورت نہیں۔