Motorola "SP" radio

[bellersley]

Okay, so we all know that Motorola has made/does make some pretty specialized radios for customers willing to pay through the nose.

I seem to remember a thread awhile back that didn't seem to go anywhere. I thought it might be interesting to see some of the radios you have, or know of, that Motorola has made for customers that aren't an off the shelf radio.

My contribution is a specialized analog Spectra. It was produced for the Ontario Provincial Police back in the early 1980's and was used up until the implementation of a province-wide VHF Smartzone Astro system. They are still used in some northern remote regions where the Smartzone sytem has not been implemented as of yet.

The radio itself is a regular analog Spectra, but has a special MLM with special firmware. Also, the remote mount interconnect board is heavily modified.

As for the control head! It's totally customized. These heads were originally intended for a Motorola Syntor, as that's what was available when the system was designed (in 1978ish). The control head carries a part number of VCN1020A. There are 4 modes of operation: NORmal (the Trunking system), SIMplex, COMmon (142.7700, province wide) and TACtical. The AUX button turns scan on and off.

In regular RSS, the radio reads as an A9 with 64 channels. If you look at the control head, each button is mapped out to a matching button on the 9 head. I was told that the 9 head is actually based on this control head, as it was out well before the 9 ever was. The radio needs special RSS which isn't available from Motorola and because it was a single user, I'd imagine would be impossible to obtain these days.

Basically, the system used MDC as a control channel for the trunking side of things. From what I hear, it was the first trunking system ever designed by Motorola, but that remains to be proven.

The radios also had a companion mobile repeater. The "PRT" button on the control head turned this on and off. The repeater is a HEAVILY modified Mitrek, complete with a built in duplexer, operating on 411.3125MHz. I am told that if you were to obtain different crystals and retuned the duplexer, simply applying power to the radio would make it operate as a stand alone full duplex repeater.

The model number of the Spectra radios are V1377A and V1296. I suspect the difference is just a revision of some kind.

Here's a picture of the control head. My apologies for the really crappy picture quality, but it's a camera phone. I'll work on getting some decent ones (and more for that matter).

Control Head (off):


Control Head (display):


Mitrek Repeater:



So, what do you have?

[MTS2000des]

are you sure about those dates? Spectras date to the late 80's (1987/88) not early 80's and Syntor X9000's were from similar time frame (1986) not 1978.
Smartzone trunking didn't exist in the late 70's...Privacy Plus type I was just born then...

[bellersley]

No no. They just switched to a SmartZone system 5 years ago. The original spec radios were the MCX series (I believe), but that was replaced with the Syntor when the system was finally built, later replaced by the Spectra.

[Pj]

From the little pics I see, looks like the Railroad Spectra.

The spectra itself was introduced in the late 1980's. The MCX1000 was the closest thing to the Spectra, and was preveliant in Canada.

The progression is Syntor>MCX>Spectra

[ve3nsv]

Ah yes the old OPP legacy system, most sites had two voice channels and the channel that wasn't in use was usually acking away. Like todays digital and encryption scares, a lot of people up here thought it was the beginning of the end of scanning until it was realized that they only transmitted a PL of 107.2hz when there was voice traffic on the channel.

The worse part was the tower only carried the mobile side of the conversation if it was a general broadcast or set up as a tac, or if the dispatcher left her PTT down while the officer was talking.

They still use the 411.3125mhz as one of the 3 available VR repeater frequencies.

Here is a sample of the old NOR or Legacy system acking away.

http://www.kb9ukd.com/digital/mystery-C ... 445-AM.wav

[bellersley]

Yeah, the first thing I thought of when I saw the thing was the RR Spectra.

I remember back in the day there was an "OPP board" you could get for your scanner which was basically a PL tone board. Those babies sold like hotcakes! It was annoying though, because sometimes the base station screwed up and transmitted the "marker" - the annoying MDC, with a PL tone which of course would cause a scanner to go bonkers. The actual system radios of course, wouldn't hear anything.

I like how that recording VE3NSV posted says the recording is in AM. Sounds pretty FM to me! As annoying as the old NOR system was, is it geeky to say I miss it? Back in the day, I had a radio programmed as Conventional Voting Scan, with all the towers in my area programmed, so I would always hear what I'm closest to. Was very nice.

[W6JK]

X51LLT California Highway Patrol Motran. I had about 28 of these with accessories stacked in my living room for a while, long ago. 2 Freq receive, 4 Freq transmit, dual PLs, and a custom control head with tone burst (4 tones, I think). There was also a 12 Freq control head in the lot, but I never saw the radio it went with.

Jeff

[doctahvms]

The Mitrek's (MX) are a real trip, they make great 70cm link radios (except for the low power output -- 9W) The duplexers are ok if using a 5Mhz split otherwise not so good. I've got a couple of these, and would take some more. Since the TX section is Mitrek and the parts are virtually interchangable, the RX is custom, but works fine, and the thing is shielded like a tank.

cheers,d

[mr.syntrx]

I've got a H44QXK7139CNSP303 secure capable 458-490 Saber III, ex South Australian Police. Some of these radios are 440-470, but most seem to be 458-490. They're mostly 5D CORE, but I have one 8D.

The 16-position switch has a stopper to only allow you to select the first two positions, one of them labelled "LOCAL", for use as a talkaround switch.

There's a special RSS to enable use of the talkaround function, AVN6092. The version I've seen was SP02.20.00, copyright Motorola Australasia, March 1989.

[MikeOxlong]

System was designed in the early 80's and the test bed went on the air in 1984 in the London area. During the test bed implementation it was found that using T1's between sites wasn't reliable enough so the system was shelved until a microwave system could be built out.

I think the rollout started somewhere around 1987. Between 1984 and 1987 most sites sat idle but continuously keyed. You could usually hear the Motorola and OPP Telecom techs chatting during commuting hours.

On all the units I saw, the AUX button was for officer initiated phone patches. The unit sent MDC600 bursts for each digit dialed which the repeater converted to dtmf tones. Kind of weird to hear over the air.

[bellersley]

System was designed in the early 80's and the test bed went on the air in 1984 in the London area. During the test bed implementation it was found that using T1's between sites wasn't reliable enough so the system was shelved until a microwave system could be built out.

I think the rollout started somewhere around 1987. Between 1984 and 1987 most sites sat idle but continuously keyed. You could usually hear the Motorola and OPP Telecom techs chatting during commuting hours.

On all the units I saw, the AUX button was for officer initiated phone patches. The unit sent MDC600 bursts for each digit dialed which the repeater converted to dtmf tones. Kind of weird to hear over the air.

Mike, on the unit I have (out of a Quinte West vehicle), if you're in a SIM mode, pushing AUX turns scanning of SIM11 (or SIM1 if in an old area) on and off. It puts an "S" in the screen.

I'm curious about this system though. From what I've been able to gather online, the nearest place this system is still in use is in the Thunder Bay area, all else being on the VHF Smart Zone Bell system. Is there a special version of RSS that allows one to change mode names, eg from SIM 4 to say VE3NCF? Aside from "cool" factors, I think these radios are pretty well useless.

[MikeOxlong]

The change in the AUX function was probably done when the radios were last programmed to add Sim11.

These radios do/did require a special version of RSS.

Sometimes easier to change out the mlm's firmware and add a regular head.

[bellersley]

I know of a fellow not too far from me that used to (maybe still does?) modify these radios to be a standard VHF spectra. Aparantly he gets a decent buck for them. I wouldn't imagine there are too many of these around anymore. Any idea what happened to all the old radios? I imagine they got thrown out or at the very least have been raped for parts. I got mine at a hamfest Markham a year or two ago.

The special version of the RSS isn't a problem. But, all it lets you do is change frequencies. The channels read out as "NOR 1/1", "NOR 3/1" and that kind of thing. It'd sure be nice to be able to change the display from showing whatever it usually shows. There was a special programming key that went into one of the Syntor style plugs on the bottom of the head which was just two pins shorted. Using this allowed you to go into a programming mode that lets you change (umong several other things) the District, MDT enable/disable, RAM Access and a few other things. Rumour has it there is another RSS version that is specific for changing mode names on the control head. They're aparantly stored in the head instead of the MLM like one would expect.

I wanted a dedicated radio for railway monitoring, so right now "SIM 1" is C.N. Rail channel 1 (161.415) and that's it's sole purpose in life for me now. Seriously overkill but it looks cool! And that handset is pretty interesting. It looks very similar to the Ackermann handset that the O.P.P. are currently using.

Edit: Using standard Spectra RSS makes the radio very unhappy. You can read from it all day long but as soon as you write to it, you get EEPROM ERROR on the control head anytime you boot up. However, doing a read/write with the special RSS takes care of that. One interesting tidbit. Using the special "OPP RSS", you cannot change what is in the scan list. However, if you read it with standard RSS you can change scan list items. Writing gives you the EEPROM ERROR message but again, that's simple to fix.