Minitor V low-band sensitivity

[plectron719]

The V has big audio and receives distant signals very well on VHF-hi, I was thinking about getting one for Low band (33mhz),
Is the sensitivity just as good on the Minitor V for the low band? Over 90% of the county gets toned out on low here and my MinII seems to be slowing down with age. 911 uses several towers for low band and i can pick up most weaker signals on the Crystal units..was told that the V lacks in the low band area.

Thanks in advance.

[res6cue]

You're going to be hard pressed to beat the performance of the II in any band, let alone low band. I'm not overly impressed with the V's performance on low band. It seems to either be not very sensitive on the default squelch setting, or too prone to interference and false alerting if you tweak the squelch setting to increase sensitivity. Of course the V is loaded with many more features than the II, so you have to decide what's more important or what your needs are.

[chrismoll]

I have a minitor V low band 45-49MHz and I have a Motorola Minitor V Programmer Kit

On low band it seems pretty good, if you have more towers then your golden
I actually put my squelch to 5 the maximum opened squelch, it goes pretty decent, i do get interference when I walk near a computer or near a microwave but overall, its does pretty well on low band, after all the low band for a minitor V has been tweaked

[Luke]

For what it's worth, I had a Minitor V and II side by side and the V picked up all the tones and audio from a fairly distant low band department (for pagers anyway) while the II picked up the audio only, and not as clear. I don't have much experience with the pagers but I personally see a difference in the reception... with the V being better. I have heard many arguments about the II being more sensitive and I tend to agree. In the recent side by side test, the V won.

[res6cue]

Well, a side by side test is a good starting point, although there are clearly a lot of variables and it's not a controlled environment (which is just as well, since the real world where we use these pagers isn't a laboratory!) First thing I would wonder is, how old is the II? When was the last time it was tuned? Is the squelch adjustment optimized? The point is that the V is obviously much newer than the II, so I'd like to see them side by side after the II has been given some TLC and brought back up to peak operating efficiency. Also, believe it or not, but just a mere few inches can make a huge difference in reception. I've had two pagers side by side where Pager A receives great and Pager B does not, only to switch the positions the pagers are in, and all of a sudden Pager B was the one receiving great and Pager A wasn't. I'm literally talking 3 inches apart!

I'd like to see you run that test again after at least adjusting the squelch on the II (easy to do by yourself), and switch the positions the pagers are in halfway through the test to be sure it's not the physical position the pager is in that's influencing the test. Also I wouldn't put the pagers too close to each other so that they might be interfering with each other in some way.