Batboard

Is it just me or does using the speakermic on the HT1250 lowband cut the usable transmit range almost in half? And no...the mic isn't clipped onto the antenna.
If I remove the speakermic, I can actually use the radio farther than a half mile.

Radio held in same position for the comparison or is the radio clipped to the belt when the speaker mic. is being used ?

It's held in the same position. I just tried this with a field-strength meter and it verified my thoughts. With the radio sitting in the same place relative to the meter, there is much more radiated signal without the mic connected.
??????????????

I don't believe there's any RF available from the side connector on that series so it wouldn't appear attaching the speaker mic. could cause a problem directly. I'm guessing here that RF is being absorbed into the coil cord of the speaker mic. by it's proximity, perhaps the coil cord is approx. resonant at VHF-low increasing absorption.
Only possible senario I can come up with- anyone hear of this before ?

There IS RF present on the connector. I recenty received an RF burn on the radio edge connector while transmitting with no cap covering the terminals.

On low band hand held radios the antenna is VERY critical, is yours tuned properly? The low band antennas have to be cut to the proper frequency, they are NOT screw-in and play!

Surprised to hear there's RF on the side connector as the PSM isn't picking up RF from it, it has that wacky interface that picks up RF from the antenna connector.

The antenna is cut according to the chart.

....bizarre

i'm not familiar with the ht1250, but i think the ht1000 has that "dimple" on the side connector which, when depressed, re-routes RF through to the speaker mic cable. i also know that speaker mics with the antenna jack on the mic tend to be poor performers with a VHF radio, but work fine for UHF. motorola reps have told me this a couple times now.