This video show some interesting history on Motorola products over the years. Take a peek.

The Motorola Amateur Radio club is celebrating the 80th aniversary of Motorola by operating a special event station this weekend. For more details, check out the MARC website. Thanks to Dan, KF4LUC for the info.

My first year at Dayton I was hunting pretty hard for obscure and unusual Motorola gear. I remember seeing a MT500 from Motorola (a crystal controlled rig) on 29 mhz. Well, it's been on my list to own something similar ever since then. I had a chance recently and it was easy as pie. Here is what you'd need to know about putting one of these on 10 meter FM.

(Radio is shown compared to one of the smaller current production radios)

Motorola USA has announced its intention to launch a tender offer to acquire a controlling interest in Vertex Standard Co, Ltd. Vertex Standard is the parent company of Yaesu. Motorola will own 80 percent of Vertex Standard; Tokogiken, a privately held Japanese company, controlled by current president and CEO of Vertex Standard Jun Hasegawa, will retain 20 percent, forming a joint venture. The total purchase price for 80 percent of the outstanding shares on a fully diluted basis will be approximately US $108 million. (ARRL sources)
For further details, click here.

To do our echolink operations, we decided to use the VA3TO interface.

Details can be found here.



We designed a small module to interface between our radio of choice, the Motorola Maxtrac or GM300. These radios are reliable, very durable and easily adaptable to a variety of situations. All of our references on these pages require a radio with the expanded signaling board. That would be radios with 16 or 32 channels, and a 16 pin connector on the back that is programmable. A 2 or 8 channel radio, or a radio with a 5 pin connector will not work with this setup. CDM series radios will also work just fine. All connections are via the rear connector.

Have an old GP300/P110/GP350/P1225 charger lying around?

This programming cable/stand is made from

an old GP300 rapid charger (HTN9886C)

a piece of ethernet cable

RJ-45 to DB-25 adapter

(You can substitute a regular DB-25 connector, this is just what we had on hand)

So first you will probably need to go inside and eliminate some things. You can remove the plug where AC would plug in. You will likely need to move some of the pins on the board. Some chargers will have all four pins that would normally make contact with the battery, and some only two. They need to be positioned in the middle of the four possible places, or you just need to use those two for programming.

I'm not sure if I have shared this with folks here yet. This repeater is extremely portable and light and is fully featured. This repeater is built out of two Motorola handhelds (GP300 series) and is on the two SERA approved itinerant UHF pairs. The duplexer actually tuned up OK and allowed for both pairs.