35 YEARS RECEIVERS
Chapter 9 - Part 2
By Michael Stevenson
To continue the story, the Sangean ATS-909 had some excellent mods at a web site run by Dave Moison, unfortunately, this web site no longer appears to be operating.

The mods turned the 909 into a more DX style of radio and I have carried out several of the mods that was listed by Dave Moison, the first was to remove the muting while tuning the radio which means now I can hear everything while either fast or slow tuning with either scanning or by finger or with the tuning knob, no more waiting or having to tune slowly across the frequencies wondering if there is a station there or not.

The only problem is that it makes tuning rather noisy although the second mod removes the chuffing sound made as the radio is stepped tuning, the only noise remaining now is some synthesizer noise and the sound of the shortwave bands!

The next mod is to speed up the AGC which works rather well.

The 4th mod I did was not due to Dave Moison but comes from Kiwa in the USA and that is to install a more narrow filter in the narrow bandwidth position allowing 3.6 kHz rather than 4.8 kHz, this also works very well indeed and makes it much better trying to tune into a station with another stronger one 5 or 10 kHz away especially if you tune the radio 1 or 2 kHz in the opposite direction to the unwanted QRM. There are some other mods that I have not yet carried out such as taking the detent feel out of the small rotary tuning knob making it much smoother to tune, this does not remove the stepped tuning at all so I did not think it worthwhile doing this mod, I only use the tuning knob for tuning down or up by 1 kHz, otherwise, I use the 5 kHz tuning buttons or the presets (there are 256 on shortwave!!) or direct frequency entry. My version of the Sangean ATS-909 is now an excellent and powerful portable and with my version being made in Taiwan, I think it is a little better than the actual Chinese versions if the Sangean ATS-505 is anything to go, it seems to be more solidly constructed and more robust to use.

The Sangean ATS-505 will be the subject of my next installment which will be part 10. Cheers for now!!


Chapter 1| Chapter 2| Chapter 3| Chapter 4| Chapter 5|
Chapter 6| Chapter 7| Chapter 8| Chapter 9A| Chapter 9B| Chapter 10| Chapter 11|

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