Batboard

A friend of mine passed onto to me a huge 3 ring binder full off 1980s and 1990s Motorola sales literature from just about EVERY product line including cellular and subscriber radios (all the classics, Saber, Jedi....you name it). There is even a 10 page brocuche on the original Astro digital solutions dated 1991 with pass along cards. A cellular system brochure circa 1990', and a rare 1989 Communications systems buyers guide that covers everything and reads like an HRO catalog of Motorola radios, systems and solutions.

I'd like to get all this scanned and uploaded to the main Batlabs site. It's going to take much time, but I want to share this stuff. Most of this was rarely seen and certainly unobtainia by now. I don't have a good scanner. I'm working on securing one. If anyone has a good flatbed scanner they can loan or donate, I'd love to get this party started.

Obviously I need a place to upload this. This is great stuff and I want to share it with my fellow Motorola enthusiasts. This is from the "golden age" product lines in my opinion.

I'm really excited about this material. I don't know how the admins would feel as most of it is copyrighted, but I am not sharing this for commercial purposes.

I spent hours tonight going though the binder and it was like rewinding the clock to 1989 or so.

The best is the booklet on cellular that reads "the art of advanced technology is Motorola innovation" and has a collage of Motorola thumbnails on the front.

This is when the company was at its Zenith. I want to share this with all of you, it's friggin awesome.

I also have some of this type of material, so once you're done, if there's something I can contribute, I'll send it to you. This is a really great idea!

I wonder if there is enough space for a "literature.batlabs.com" type arrangement...

Wow I'd love to see that! A trip down memory lane for sure. I remember being much younger, picking up a colored sales brochure from the Moto dealer for the Systems Saber III, DROOLING over it daily, figuring out anyway possible to own one. No fleabay back then! Oh wait- no home computers either Lol. Wow. Thats why I love my AS3 so much. cool stuff. Wish i'd a scanner to donate

I will start looking in to what solution could be used for this.

you also may want to talk to john marcson over at elightbars.org

he did this with whelen and a few other catalogs and stuff. they have the pics hosted on photobucket or one of those

also they have a hug vintage section and those guys will want to see it

I for one would love to see those old sales brochures, and other such literature from that time period !

Excellent news! I'd kill to see some high-rez scans of this stuff.

alex wrote:I will start looking in to what solution could be used for this.

Great, I am supposed to pick up a fairly high end scanner next week for the asking, so this will facilitate the creation of the scans.

I even found brochures for the Secure Clear cordless phones, circa 1993. Remember those? Voice inversion, they had a demo button so you could demonstrate to your calling party what a scanner listener would hear should they tune in. Pretty hilarious by today's standards, with DECT phones running encryption on FHDSS selling for $40. The Motorola phones were in the DPC cellular form factor, and sold for upwards of $100-150. Quite a bit of change for a 43/49MHz toy!

I begged and pleaded with my parents to buy us one. We got the cheaper light gray one- rather than the black version with the base speakerphone. I used to carry it around the neighborhood as a child. Those were the days.

As far as hosting the images, check out flickr. They allow original resolutions as well as several resizing options built in. They also have a great tagging and organizational system that would make for easy browsing. A pro subscription is only $24 / year, which allows you unlimited photo uploads. Well worth it, IMO. I'd definitely be willing to throw some $$ towards that.

If you get this stuff scanned and don't have a permanent hosting solution in place yet, there are plenty of free file hosts out there you can use to get stuff out in the wild or to pass along to someone who has hosting space. 4shared and MediaFire are two of the better ones.. they require signup to upload, but not to download. Once you upload your files, you get a download link that can be posted here or emailed to anyone.

I have maybe fifteen or twenty Motorola data/catalog sheets I'll gladly contribute for free. They're not doing me any good just
sitting here in the binder and if our large group would get some use out of them so much the better.

Are you thinking of also including tech/instruction/service sheets as well? I have a ton of those, for Sabers, MT500s, etc.

Any news on this? If it looks like too much of a burden, I'll gladly donate my time to scan a chunk of them.

Mike,

I may take you up on that and just mail you the binder if you have the time. I ended up getting a second non-paying job on the engineering staff of a community radio station that is, well, in dire need of a paid engineer. Sorry guys, just been extremely short on time.

**edit** I'll PM you.