Within the last week or two, one of my more useful radios for my work-related activities went missing,
but it took me a few days to be sure that it's not just misplaced.
No, it's not a Motorola radio. I keep a close eye on THOSE at all times!
It's a VHF M/A-COM 7100IP, system model (full keypad) which has EVERY possible and impossible option in it as well.
There are forty theoretically possible features, and this has all forty of them. 1 to 40, straight through. It was a
developmental example used to check feature intercompatibility across different firmware releases, and I rebuilt
it from parts of more than one radio. The feature string is roughly equivalent to finding an Astro portable with
a flashcode of FFFFFF-FFFFFF-F.
As such, it does some form of encryption (I think that the hardware can really take only ONE at a time, but the
feature code says it does them ALL...) and it definitely does IMBE CAI and it has FRONT PANEL PROGRAMMABILITY
as well. (But only for ONE selected channel at a time...pretty cheesy.)
The internal microphone does not work so it had a speaker-mic attached to it at the time it went missing.
I do not know the radio's serial number. And the ESN is likely not going to match the serial decal on the
back of the frame in any event as the radio was rebuilt from parts. I have many such radios to rebuild
and reassemble from boxes of parts but almost no VHF ones.
The company I work with got both of its service vehicles broken into last week. I truly do not know if my
radio was on one of those vehicles or not, at the time. But I do not believe that the person who (may have)
taken the radio is "radio savvy" in the least. I think it was just some local lowlife who wanted to find a few
tools and other cool things to sell at a pawnshop to finance his next fix.
Alternatively, it MIGHT have been stolen from my car at home. I make a serious effort to keep my car locked
up and valuables not left in it, but I know that once in the past two weeks I came out to my car in the morning
and discovered I'd failed to lock it the night before. With my luck, that's when the local recently-released-from-prison
sleazeball went for a walk, testing car doors to see if they're unlocked. (Incidentally, he got arrested again last
Thursday night....so he's not done being a criminal.)
I've contacted two police departments regarding this incident, and one already has added my report to the
report made on my workplace's vehicle break-ins. But local policy is that the police do not canvass the pawn
shops on a routine basis so I'll have to do some visiting by myself.
Location: The radio went missing in or near Melbourne, Florida, within the past two weeks as of the date of
this posting, which is October 8, 2007.
There is a reward offered for the return of this radio. No questions will be asked if it is voluntarily returned.
Elroy
