At AU$33 I couldn't resist ordering one of these little all band receivers with sideband.
Putting aside the speaker, which is so tiny as to be a joke, it does actually work rather well. Plugging in headphones or a powered speaker and you have a reasonable radio. However, the operation is quite annoying. The single knob with centre push must be double pressed to bring up a menu to choose things including volume by scrolling up and down.
A large part of the excellent screen is taken up with a silly dial display. Happily clever people have created improved firmware that makes better use of the screen and makes it more pleasant to use.
The device has an ESP32-S3 and the improved firmware is available here: https://github.com/G8PTN/ATS_MINI/
I'm using version 1.0. I tried, and failed, to flash it with esptool.py, so relented and used the Windows only Flash Download Tool from Espressif from here: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-test-tools/en/latest/esp32/production_stage/tools/flash_download_tool.html
Run it and choose the ESP32-S3 and USB:
Then select the three files and enter the memory addresses like this (click to enlarge):
Note that you must use the "..." buttons and choose the files from your own downloaded and unzipped files. The offsets are 0x0, 0x8000, 0x10000.
When plugged in via the USB-C port and powered on, my radio came up as COM4 but yours might be different.
Click the Start button. When it finished, unplug the radio, power it off and on again. If all went well, it will show the version number. The first time I powered on I long pressed the encoder to wipe the flash.
There is at least one video showing this process but I find reading a web page a much better way to find out this stuff than watching a video.
The software is written using the Arduino platform and the ATS_MINI.ino file gives lots of technical information about the configuration of the radio including the display which is a TFT-eSPI device.
A wonderful open source contribution.
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