CAN I USE A MODERN COMPUTER TO PROG. A MSF5000?

[icom98]

Do I have to use an older 386/33MHz computer to program an MSF5000 repeater or can I get away with something newer. I know the slow/older computers are essential to the older Motorola stuff.

Thanks,
Larry

[MTS2000des]

Do I have to use an older 386/33MHz computer to program an MSF5000 repeater or can I get away with something newer. I know the slow/older computers are essential to the older Motorola stuff.

Thanks,
Larry

The MSF is one that will not play nice with anything faster than a 486, it has more to do with newer UARTS than CPU speed. I had a Toshiba dual core Tecra a while back, it ran DOS great and could read/write MTSX radios well but older radios (including the MSF5000) vomited when used. IIRC the MSF RSS bombed when trying to run it on that machine (booting to pure DOS 6.22 off a CD-ROM and using a small FAT16 partition for the RSS itself).

For this, I had to break out the ol' Satellite 486-SX25 with 4MB of RAM and huge 210MB hard drive. Worked perfectly.

[kcbooboo]

I have been using a Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop computer to program MSF5000s for almost 10 years. I boot up to pure DOS 6.22 from a floppy and run the software off the hard drive. The program seems to need almost all of the normal 640kB RAM that DOS has available to work with. Nothing else is loaded; no drivers, no other programs. CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT are essentially empty. This computer uses a Pentium 3 processor running at 850 MHz and is maxed out with 256MB of RAM.

The MSF5000 communicates at 1200 baud. Not exactly a speed demon.

Bob M.

[motorola_otaku]

1 GHz PIII IBM Thinkpad A22m here, reads & writes to CXB MSFs no problem. I don't even need to enable cacheoff first.

[icom98]

Thanks everyone for yor input.

Regards,
Larry