Batboard

Have an VHF model Minitor IV, that up until this week seemed to work fine. When station tones would drop, the Minitor would light up the red light and do it's series of beeps when tones dropped.

Sometime this week, the unit stopped responding to the tones and would sound the tones as you would hear them if they went out over the scanner. Today it would recieve the tone, the red light would come on, and it would emit an medium pitch beep, once and then go into normal operations.

Anybody have any idea why the unit would start doing this. It hasn't been subjected to any harsh treatment, water etc... It just started doing this.

cold soldier joints near belt clip, how old is this radio, how much do you use it? tell us more info>>>

When tones go off squeeze the pager together and see if it works then. I the chip in my minitor III came unsoldiered and it would not go off. Just a thought....

or, it's just the shoddy design and flaws that have plagued the IV line since it's inception. Although it looks ugly as hell, i'll bet you a II is much more durable and will last you longer. just because it's new, doesn't mean it's gonna work well.

the guys earlier were right, check the soldier joints, if they'regood.....ship it back.

I hope you got the extended warrenty package on those because you will need it! They do this all the time, biggest POS motorola ever made for the fire service.

This seems to be a recurring problem with the IV. Initially, we had found that sometimes, if you turn the pager off and then back on again, it would cure the problem. This was found out completely by accident. I personally carry a SV model and when the voice storage bank is full, the pager would act like this. When you turn it off and back on again, the pager would "clear" or dump the memory.

All Minitor IVs are the same inside (2 channel with the SV option), even if you don't have all the option buttons. This trick will work on some units without the SV since it still has the option internally. Esentially, the unit is still storing voice data even though there is no way to access it. I don't think this is a cold solder problem like the III series had as we have sent a couple back to the factory for service with engraved cases and paint filled into the engraved areas. The cases appear to never have been removed as the paint in the letters was never damaged or cracked.

Another option is to try and reload the prgramming into the pager. We have found that this also works sometimes on these pagers. Motorola dropped the ball again on the Minitor series and (as always) they won't admit that there is a problem and the general public are the ones left holding the bag on this. As stated, get the extended warranty option as you will most likely need it for these POS pagers.

What kills me is that they had a winner in the Minitor II and even had the gall to discontinue support for it with the release of the IV so as to force people to move up to the newer $#!t. If they would only have taken the II and left it as a crystal based reciever with programmable tones, they would have been so much better off. If anybody wants to make a fortune, build a better pager for the same price or less than the IV. And before everyone starts with "I heard they are making a better unit, the Minitor V", the only difference between the IV and the V is supposed to be narrow band (12.5 KHz) spacing.

Yea, they said the same thing about the IV when the III was all the rage (litterally). The only thing it seems they changed was the mode knob. It is STILL a piece of crap. I have no reason to believe the 5 will be any better.

Alright...I'll go on a limb here but...

My town recently recieved a grant, and all the dept's in town dumped the Min2's for Min 4's. This was basically done since the tone outs are now on UHF and not lowband. So far, they seem to be working out nicely. Two channel with scan, and standard a-b and c triggers.

During the first week, my pager would trip on another dept's EMS tone, but that has since stopped. Actually, a few pagers did this, so I am thinking someting with the actual tone or transmitter may have been off.

So far, its working out well for us, but I agree...can't kill a Min2.

So far, 3 of the 10 Mintor IV's I bought last June have crapped out. I have no reason to believe the same will not happen to the other 7 at some point. For $40.00 each, I am having the Minitor II's refurbished so we can keep using them.

Appreciate all the responses so far. The pager is about 2-3 years old. I got this thing when they first bought out the Minitor IV's. I used it for an year and it worked flawlessly, then it went into hibernation for about an 1-1/2 years and recently had it reprogrammed for use again.

I shake it and it doesn't have any loose sounding pieces in it. No longer under warranty. So I have to pay to fix it, if something is wrong with it.

I guess I can get it re-programmed. Currently have it set up.

A- Freq 1, with tone
B- Freq 1, Alert only, with tone. Sits silent until tones go off.
C- Freq 1 and Freq 2, scan, with tone.
D- Same as C

Be nice if I had crystals, and tone reeds for my Minitor II, but they are hard to come by. If I had them I would put it back into service, but I kinda like the IV, the feel of the selector switches and the audio output.

dude, call G&G communications in Leroy New York, he can program a Min 2 on any freq, except 12.5mhz, he programmed my 2 on a 425.400 UHF freq, it works great, reception is not as good as the 4, but who cares it works great and its cheap only 52.95 each. check him out on the web at http://www.iinc.com/ggcomm

Gocart878 wrote:he programmed my 2 on a 425.400 UHF freq, it works great, reception is not as good as the 4, but who cares it works great and its cheap only 52.95 each.

If your Minitor IV is recieveing better than your II, SEND IT BACK! (The II) A crystal platform is much more stable than a synthasized one and should be (by far) the better reciever of the 2. I would definately have the alignment of the II checked.

Got this thing working again, normally, for now. Cut it off, and after a while alert tones came thru and it beeped appropriately, etc.....

Station tones went off again and it acted the same way I reported before.

Seems like I have to cut the unit off and then back on again each time tones go off to clear it's memory, and it does fine?

Appreciate everybody's solid advice on this problem.

In addition to what has also been suggested you may need to pull a few more layers of the onion off.

Question # 1: What is the power source for the unit??? Rechargeable batteries or 'AAA' batteries.

Question # 2: Push on the battery door and move it around while closed and does it make the pager power on and off again???

Question # 3: Was the pager converted from a 1 ch to a 2 ch or SV added???

Question # 4: What freq to you get paged out on??? IS it ch. 1 or ch. 2 in the pager??? Then in addition does this problem happen on all settings or just C and D.

If you can recieve a page and it alerts normally but then you have to turn off the pager to reset it so the tones go off again leads me to some sort of programming issue.

If this is only happening on switch position C and D then I would have to say it is some how related to the scanning of the two ch. of the pager. I ran into a same problem myself once with scanning.

The fire department is on Ch. 2 on the pager with a standard QC II format, and my ambulance gets paged out on Ch. 1 with a long tone QC set-up. Well my tone length would get clipped by the scanning feature and then since the A tone was not the full 1 sec it would not alert. Then likewise if the long tone was not it's full length the pager would only alert quickly with one short alert instead of a 2 second alert. So I would check with some of those items first.

The part that questions me and makes me wonder is that it alerts fine but then you have to turn it off and on again to get it to reset. That is if I am understanding the problem and what you are doing correctly.