I got the receiver dispatched few days ago after buying on Amazon. Mine one was priced around 160Euros. I went for the version offered with a soft touch VFO since the experience I had with the traidtional VFO from the ATS-20 was just very bad.
The receiver is sligtly bigger than the ATS-20 and offers a nice dimensions touchscreen for operations.
With its whip antenna - in short waves -it does not pick up any signal with the exception of few strong broadcasters, in Medium wave it just receives the 900 kHz of RAI - Milano which broadcasting center is roughly 50 km away from my home.
With external aerial on shortwave broadcasting bands, it just does the work one is expecting: good signals, fine audio quality, using attenuation features it can also manage quite strong signals without that much of intermodulation and overloading. Basically no difference with other general purpose desktop receivers I own.
I connected the recevier to two different internal active loops (the GS5-SE + ML3 Grahn Spezialantennen and the AOR LA-400) and also inside the house it gets many signals, also weak ones. During late afternoon and early morning with the AOR LA-400 I could receive all the available broadcasters from Asia (Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, both Koreas, The Philippines, Taiwan),Guam, Mariana islands and also Radio Habana, Radio Marti, WRMI, WWCR. No issues with european stations and midde east ones.
On SSB seems to me that the audio quality of the ATS-20 is slightly better and also a little less noisy.
I like to remark that the reception with the AOR-LA400 was really amazing and that the small Japanese loop outperformed the Grahn GS5-SE+ML3 when the two are compared on this small ATS-25. This looked weird to me and the testing of the ATS-25 turned into a comparison between the 2 loops on various bands. I must mention that the roof of my house (the shack is just under the roof) is built in wood...basically the same as being outside.
I thought that next would be to find a loop as small as the AOR with energy supplied by battery instead from the home AC line.
Et Voilà!! I found this (cheap) internal active loop, chinese made, at 80 Euros on Amazon, on ebay it can be found also at just 60 euros. Surely it will not perform as the AOR LA400, but it costs 5 times less. Is called "GA-450 loop" it's smaller than the AOR (only 20cm diameter vs.30cm diameter of the AOR), it covers medium waves and shortwaves from 2300 up to 30000 kHz. And finaly it is powered with a 1000 mAh internal rechargable battery, I have not that many expectations and illusions but let's see what happens when it's delivered.
Here following some more pictures of the screen options of the ATS 25.
Usefull features are: the direct input of the fequency from a key-in screen, and the "seek" up and down along the band. The seek functions I would suggest to be activated with a step of 1 kHz search otherwise it simply skips many stations which are indeed there; seeking up down it finds 1 or 2 or 3 stations, surfing the band with manual VFO you find >10. Which is the level of signal below which the seek functions does not stop? Unknown.
Interesting is also the INFO screen with many details on the signal and the reception.
In FM I just made a quick tour: with it's whip antenna signals are there, audio not bad, RDS works.
