Batboard

While watching an episode of Emergency, I was reminded of the old uhf system that was designed to enable paramedics in the field to communicate with hospitals and send ekg's.
I remember helping medics setup both Biophone and Apcor but I never learned much about the radios and have never seen one surplus. Could the Apcor have been an MX? Was it full duplex?

We had an old Apcor at the shop I used to work at. I took it apart, and it did contain a duplexer, so it must have been full duplex. The system here used high power UHF stations on the hilltops, but the Apcor talked back to the Micor in the ambulance and it retransmitted on VHF at high power. We had one of the Micors also, but I didn't play with it. I was busy with with the old CHP Micors on low band with GE Executive II VHF "extenders".

I had a few Apcor's that I obtained from a fire dept. upgrading to new units a few years back. What I remember from the one;s I had is that it had a repeater mode position
and in fact was a full duplex repeater though
the input/output freq's. were reversed (the repeater output was 5 Mhz higher than the input). I was told this mode was for when the Apcor was left in the ambulance and the medics could then hit the EMS repeater by using their portables to TX to the Apcor which would in turn re-transmit the message to the to hit the EMS repeater input- more like a portable extender and had about 10w
output. I do remember the PL reeds were identical to the MT-500 variety but can't remember on which portable the Tx/Rx boards were based. Very nicely constructed heavy duty units. I got rid of them as I wanted to use them as portable GMRS repeaters but the
reverse input/output complicated things a bit too much. Guess if you had the capabilities of re-tuning both the TX and RX
5 MHz and and addressing that same issue with the duplexer it would make a real nice unit capable of running on battery when necessary.

I remember the APCOR, quite well. They were actually TWO MX radios in a case with a duplexer and a high power PA. Actually, there were a couple of versions of APCOR. The high power version had a 12 watt PA. The low power version had a 1 watt PA and was designed to be used with the Micor "MEMCOM" EMS mobile radio. The MEMCOM was full duplex and had an option for an auxiliary receiver so that it could act as a mobile repeater.

The APCOR could be operated in PTT, VOX, RPT modes and could send telemetry. They operated in full duplex mode. They were supposed to be used with full duplex, non repeated systems so that there was telephone style communications with the hospital base station. They all came with 10 channels, as far as I know. The frequencies were the standard EMS UHF set.

There was also a channel steering option, with a small key pad on the handle. This could be used to change frequencies on the mobile radio remotely. I never saw one of these in action, so I don't know how well they worked.

We still have several of them, but Motorola stopped supporting them years ago. I don't even know if batteries are still available or not.