Batboard

First time posting here. I use a Motorola Spectra for a railroad scanner feed which I broadcast from my house. I've lost touch with the gentleman in Florida who originally programmed the radio for me. I'm looking to remove a couple channels from the radio, but lack the proper computer to do so for the radio which was manufactured in 1995. I'm just outside of Baltimore, MD, and willing to ship the radio UPS if someone can help please.

Regular Pentium-class PCs can run the last versions of Spectra RSS just fine as long as you can boot into DOS natively and have a hardware serial port. I use a Toughbook CF-18 with no issues.

I'd strongly recommend programming the entire 99-channel AAR standard plan into the radio (it supports 128 channels so no issues there) and just adding and removing channels from the scan list as needed. Unless you know something I don't I'm not aware of any splinter channel or NXDN usage in Baltimore/Washington, except maybe for NS police (and they're encrypted anyway.)

To further elaborate, the radio has all the AAR channels in it so it would just be a matter of locking a few channels. I don't have a computer with a serial port. The one quote I received from a local Motorola dealer was $115 an hour for service, and they couldn't tell me how long it would take to program it. Knowing that I only need channels locked out does that make it simpler vs programming the radio like I initially told the dealer?

Sounds like a scan list issue. Is the scan user selectable

I know this is a real old posting, but I have a couple of comments.

Have you tried stopping by the computer repair stores in your area? Most of them will freely give you computers they are throwing out. So go on a hunt and make friends with the stores.

I have picked up a pile of computers over the years. Always on the lookout for older, slow clock speed computers. If nothing else, they are good for a pile of parts. You might try getting friendly with the owner and see if he will release the hard drives. Most of the time, these are pulled to protect the original owner and the information these hard drives may contain.

But like I said, you can collect a pile of parts, like the floppy drives, CD drives, memory boards jumpers off the mother boards and the computer power supply.

I generally will try to see if the computer will run by putting in an 80 GB hard drive, load windows and see if the computer will function. If not, then it gets stripped for parts. If it works, then it may be worth keeping. All depends on what your looking for.

But over the years, I have managed to pick up some really nice computers, even some 64 bit ones. Monitors are there for the asking, along with the keyboards and of course the mice.

Jim

I might elaborate a little. The Spectra radios require pure DOS to be programmed. Not a DOS BOX in Windows. You will also need a computer with an operating speed no more than about 900 MHz. There is a program called MOSLO that can help some computers and allow some faster computers to function in programming the Spectra radios.

The Spectra radios are a find radio. The VHF versions of these radio were used for years by many many fire and police departments around the country. In some cases you could run across a pile of therm and all the control cables and power cables in a storage area. I picked up a number of them in my travels around the country. Have like 6 of them on my bench on different 2 meter and some 440 repeaters locally.

If your looking for 6 and 10 meter FM radios, the look around for some Syntor 9000 low band radios. I have found that they will do both 6 and 10 meters in the same radio with no retunning once I got them set up, But they use a different programming software from the Spectra. Plus the programming cable needed is different.

You will need a RIB between the computer COM serial port and the Spectra radio. These cables you can make. The info on theses cables is on the BATLABS site.

You will need a copy of the Spectra programming software. There are a number of different versions floating around. You might ask some of the hams in your area if they play with the old Motorola Spectra radios. Another place is the Russian Radiohackers site.

Enjoy the Spectra mobile radios. They come in a dash radio and a trunk mounted radios. The trunk radios need both the control cable and the power cable, along with the control head and a speaker.

There are a number of sources, you just have to look around. The first place I would start with is the 911 dispatch center and try to make friends with the director. That person should be a good source of info and who to maybe talk with. Another place is the SKY WARN ham groups. Someone in the group should possibly know who to point you towards.

Manuals for these radios are available to download online if you look around enough.

Enjoy these old boat anchors as some hams call them To me, they are a very solid and hard working radio. You may have to replace some of the electrolytic capacitors in the radio. The ones Motorola used tend to start to leak an can etch off the circuit lands on the boards.

Jim