Syntor x9000 Help ?

[K8SWR]

I picked up a Syntor x9000 T71KEJ70AK today at a yard sale, and I was told it worked, but when I got it home and hooked it up to the power supply, nothing came on, I would think the power switch was on the bottom of the control head,

I after reading I see there is (2) Two wires Orange and Green on the control head plug, that are cut and I'm told they need 12 volts to them one for TX and One for RX. is this correct ? also is there another way to power the control head ? there is an added Green wire that looks to be spliced into a red wire, that is inside of the connector that connects the to Radio unit. Is this a possible way to power the head ?

Thanks

[Astro Spectra]

Only place to go for Syntor info is Mike's site:

http://www.onfreq.com/syntorx/index.html

[Astro Spectra]

And maybe repeater builder:

http://www.repeater-builder.com/motorol ... index.html

[Jim202]

I picked up a Syntor x9000 T71KEJ70AK today at a yard sale, and I was told it worked, but when I got it home and hooked it up to the power supply, nothing came on, I would think the power switch was on the bottom of the control head,

I after reading I see there is (2) Two wires Orange and Green on the control head plug, that are cut and I'm told they need 12 volts to them one for TX and One for RX. is this correct ? also is there another way to power the control head ? there is an added Green wire that looks to be spliced into a red wire, that is inside of the connector that connects the to Radio unit. Is this a possible way to power the head ?

Thanks

First of all, you need to be a little more descriptive of this extra green wire and just where it is connected. There is a place on the back of the control head for an extra connector. These connections can be used for input and output control with low current ability.

Yes, the power control is the green and orange wires that come out of the molded control cable connector that plugs into the rear of the control head. There is also the heavy red and black power wires coming out of the radio end of the control cable. You need to have the 12 volt power on the red wire also. Ground the black wire to the negative return of your power supply source.

You will need a slow clock speed computer (800 MHz or less) that is running DOS as the operating system to be able to program the radio. You might also need a small program called "cacheoff.com" to get around the computer cache issues. Run this program before starting the ham software.

The programming cable can be made in several ways. Buying one off of Ebay is a rather expensive move. Most of the ones I have seen are going for at least $75 or more. You can even make one out of a siren cable or one of the other accessory cable that show up on Ebay frequently. It just takes a little skill and plenty of skill to get the plastic spacer back on all the pins when you put the connector back together. Another way is to just solder wires onto the control cable connector and bring them out to a DB25 connector to mate with your RIB to program the radio. Just leave this cable there all the time.

The software can be had if you look around long enough. There are several versions of the software floating around. The original Motorola version will not allow the radio to be programmed into either the 10 meter or the 6 meter ham bands. Yes the radio will do both with no tuning to the radio. Problem is the antenna. There are very few antennas available that will cover both the 10 and 6 meter bands in one antenna.

There is a glitch in the modified ham software that won't allow you to change the fixed scan list once you make it. I have always wrote down the RF and scan channels before I even start to program the radio. Unless you have a radio with the modified firmware chip, it will only do a max of 64 scan channels. After that you can still go to the higher channels, but will not have scan. Then I use the original Motorola software to set up my fixed scan lists. You need an RF channel to do this. I set up all the required number of channels in the radio with some dummy Rf channel that is in the normal commercial range of the radio. Once the scan list is made, I then go back into the programming and change all the RF channels to have what I want in them. Just remember there is no returning to modify the scan list once you make it and put the radio on the 10 meter or 6 meter channels.

As those radios came from Motorola, they had either 32 channels or 64 channel ability. Depending on the EEPROM installed in the radio, would determine how many channels they could go to. A walk through the Mike B site will explain this in much more detail.

With the ham software, you can expand the multi Pl ability to have all 32 PL tones available for manual selection. It gets a little messy on the screen when you originally set it up, but you can do it. This allows you to have the normal fixed PL tone as well as being able to manually select which tone you want. It's great when traveling around the country and you find a active repeater. You can then step through the Pl tones till you find the right one. It gives you basically a dial a frequency radio.

Enough of the details, go look on both the repeater builders site and the Mike B site to get a much further education about this radio.

Jim

[K8SWR]

Thanks to all the Replies I had Checked out Mike's site, and traced the Added Green wire to the red wire on Pin 13 in the radio connector, which also runs to the Control Head, I know have Backlights in the control Head but No display, and speaker sound "static" when I turn it on. so I will have to research this some more.


I didn't mention this unit is a 31-50 Mhz unit, so I will have to Look for another radio unit, I assume the wiring and control head are the same ?

Thanks Again for your Help

[WB6NVH]

Unfortunately the vacuum fluorescent glass displays in many of these heads are just about shot by now. Try looking at it in a darkened room and ramp the brightness control button up and down just to see if the display is only dim, or bad altogether. This way you may be able to see any error codes or tell if the setup is working. If the display is completely worn out (unusual) or has gone to air (broken) there are usually heads on eBay cheap but you may have to buy several "not tested" ones until you get a good one. And it's a good idea to look at the pages mentioned above to make sure you get a head that will work with a conventional radio. Note that the head holds the head programming and the radio holds the radio programming.

If the radio is the wrong band for you, as the last post seems to indicate, bear in mind that VHF high and UHF versions are commercially useless (more or less) now that narrowbanding took place on 1 January, as these are not compatible. For ham use, the receivers will require VCO and front end tuning work before they will pull down into the ham range and meet original specs.

[Astro Spectra]

The low band Syntor X is a super radio that does 6m and 10m out of the box. I have the eprom version with the older 32 channel non-display control head. Really punchy audio.