I recently decided to drop the money for an ATAS-120A, and so far I have been impressed. I’m using it with my FT-857D, and on the 3rd brake light mount. On the first try it tuned up successfully on every band from 6m to 40m, and I had FT8 QSOs on 10m – 30m easily. I even had DX contacts with Czech Republic (17m), France (20m), Netherlands (12m), and Spain (17m). Not bad for 5 watts.
It was easy to find the correct menu settings on the radio to enable the antenna, and the only weird part was when I first activated it and INIT showed on the screen for a couple of minutes. I cancelled it a few times thinking something was wrong with connections but everything looked good. I finally let it run for a couple of minutes while I googled it, and then it eventually switched to ATAS. It seems this is a one-time thing, every time after that it is ready to go when I power on the radio.
Tuning is so easy, I’ve never had any kind of automatic tuning ever. In the past there was plenty of putzing with the antenna analyzer, adjusting, repeating. I’ve found that whenever I make any aspect of setting up easier that I end up on the air even more. When I put the FT-857D in a Pelican case (I should probably take some pics and detail here…), I didn’t have to hook everything up whenever I wanted to setup, I just had to add power and an antenna. Now the antenna step is even faster, I can just hook up the radio, tune in at most a minute, and it’s time to go.
So today I did my first POTA rove, I had a side gig near Sioux Falls, SD and decided to hit up a park or two on the way home. After looking at the map, I could easily get to a park in SD that was close to the hotel, and then just down the road was an Iowa park. Then I looked at the Minnesota State Parks on the map on the way home, and decided to try to hit 5 parks.
Mission accomplished:
- K-8156: Beaver Creek State Natural Area (SD)
- K-5730: Blood Run State Historic Site (IA)
- K-2471: Blue Mounds State Park (MN)
- K-2498: Kilen Woods State Park (MN)
- K-2510: Minneopa State Park (MN)
The antenna did perfectly fine driving between all these parks, I stayed off the interstate in case something broke, but had no issues with the antenna with high speeds. It is on a NMO to UHF converter mount, and that is sturdy as well. I got to the next park, and was on the air immediately. Looks like I’ll be on the air even more this summer.
One last thing, 10 meters was one of those really weird days when most of my QSOs were DX, and almost no NA stations were picking me up. I had QSOs with Serbia (x2), Ukraine, and Estonia, and 1 NA contact. PSK Reporter showed this too:
