Batboard

Anyone know which pins do what on the minitor 5? I'm looking for programing and normal use.

Take a look at aaknitt's document on a homebrew radio programming setup for the Minitor III/IV/V -- it has some of the pinouts on the middle of page 2.

http://www.geocities.com/hotfire00/Mini ... rammer.pdf

From his instructions:

This programmer has also been used to program Kenwood and Yaesu radios, and with a few tiny
modifications could probably also be used to program Motorola Radius radios, although I haven’t tried that
yet.

Would this by chance mean that if you already have a Kenwood cable, you could interface that to the pager if you do up the connections properly?

CuriousGeorge wrote:Take a look at aaknitt's document on a homebrew radio programming setup for the Minitor III/IV/V -- it has some of the pinouts on the middle of page 2.

http://www.geocities.com/hotfire00/Mini ... rammer.pdf

I saw that. Those are for the 3/4. The bottom of a V has 2 rows of 5 pins. I just don't know which pin does what.

If you do find the pinout info for the Mintor V I'd be interested to see what it is...we're getting a few of them on our department soon...don't have any info on them yet. I'd like to add the pinout to the aforementioned document. I've tried looking at some pics of the Minitor V programming cradle on the web but none I've found are clear enough to show the location of the pins. Maybe someone who has an M5 programming cradle could investigate? Or at least take a pic and post it?

Andy

nmfire10 wrote: Would this by chance mean that if you already have a Kenwood cable, you could interface that to the pager if you do up the connections properly?

I suppose it depends on what Kenwood cable you have, but there's probably a good possibility it would work. I've only tried it on Kenwood ham gear...I haven't tried any commercial radios. If you have a schematic of your Kenwood cable I could take a look...no guarantees it would work though.

Andy

Bringing this thread up to the top...has anyone found what the pinout is (at least for programming purposes) for the M5?

Andy

nmfire10 wrote:Would this by chance mean that if you already have a Kenwood cable, you could interface that to the pager if you do up the connections properly?

I use a cable I orignially made for Midlands (Syn-Tech II and XTR) to program Minitors here. My home made cable is simply a max232 RS232-TTL convertor. That is all that is in a Kenwood cable too. It should work fine.

Birken

Which Kenwood cables have you had success with? I have the cable (PG-4W) for my TH-D7. Do you think this would work?

I'm looking at getting a Minitor 5, but only if I can program it. And I'm NOT spending the outrageous prices for the interface.

I’m surprised no one has figured out the programming pins yet. Any ideas?

Lots of 'programming adapters' end up just being level shifters at their core. If you build a basic RS-232<->TTL circuit (the Max 232 type chips make this easy) you can program a suprising number of radios, scanners, pagers, etc... Of course you have to figure out the pinout and have the right software.

Yeah the PG-4W should work, although I haven't tried it. Like EENerd said, it's just an RS-232 to TTL level converter.

Man oh man no joy on the M5 programming pinout yet. How about this...would some kind soul who has a programming cradle be willing to take a picture of it from the top and post it? That would be a start!

Andy

Ok,

I took my jig apart and did a quick check - Looking down at a charger base you will see 3 pins across the bottom row, starting on the left. The last 2 spots that do not have pins are indeed the programming pins. Power and ground are the same as the charger. I didn't have time to see which 2 pins did tx or rx, but you should be able to figure it out really quick.

Hope this helps. If I can figure out how to get a print online I will.

Jeff

Excellent! Thanks for the info. If you can't figure out a way to post a print email it to me and I can post it on my webpage.

Andy

bump

Thanks to pictures from ffexpCP, we finally have the M5 programming pinout finalized. Check it out at http://radioetcetera.googlepages.com/minitorprogrammer and let me know if there are any mistakes or improvements that could be made. Also note the info about programming firmware.

Regards,

Andy