THE STATIONS THAT GOT AWAY
THE STATIONS THAT GOT AWAY This article first appeared in the August 2026 issue of my World of Shortwave Listening column for The Spectrum Monitor magazine. Further details on this excellent publication are available at www.thespectrummonitor.com One of the great conveniences of modern portable shortwave receivers is the ability to automatically scan the bands and store active frequencies in memory. Manufacturers call these features by various names: ATS (Auto Tuning Storage), ETM (Easy Tuning Mode), Auto Scan, and similar terms. The appeal is obvious: press a button, let the radio do the work, and return later to a list of stations currently on the air. Yet many shortwave listeners have noticed that stations clearly audible during manual tuning sometimes fail to appear in the radio’s automatically generated memory list. This raises an interesting question: can shortwave fading cause ATS or ETM to miss stations? The evidence suggests that the answer is yes. How ATS Works Manufact...