Batboard

ANyone ever hear of a Twin V ??? I have seen lots of older Moto stuff.....but this is a new one on me. ANyone know any history on this thing. I can e mail photo if anyoe need to take a look.
Thanks

DFC2

My two bits worth:
This radio came out in the mid '50s.
The twin v = 6 or 12v operation.
Tubes & vibrators.
About the same vintage as the GE" prog line"
The test jacks are under a spring loaded flap on the front cover as I recall.
I have worked on these about 35 years ago.

I think they are mid to late 50's vintage--If memory serves the VHF ones had a 6146 in the PA. I removed one from service about ten years ago, it worked fine; they just changed freq. and didn't want to mess with it. I still have the crystals for it somewhere.

Wow, amazing what some people still use. I thought things were badd at Ft. Bragg when we still had a few Micoms in use. Guess it's time to post this monster on EBay. thaks for the info.

DFC2

I also worked on a LOT of them.
The low band also had the 6146 tube and 60 watts of power in the small 10" case. "They worked".

T41GGV1100 or 3100 for PL low band
T43GGV for hiband.

There was also a T51 and T53 version also.

My first 2 meter mobile radio was a Motorola T43GGV1100
on 34/94 so I could work the W0EQU repeater in Omaha.
A short time later I added a two-freq kit so I could use
the autopatch on 22/82 in Council Bluffs. The kit was
a PK-22 for the receiver, PK-29 for the transmitter and
a PK-52 two wire kit for the cable. After buying the rocks
and crystal ovens, (Petersen Crystals, not ICM or Tedford
Labs) I ran out of money and I couldn't add the fancy
escutcheon to the control head so I drilled out the plate
and installed a toggle switch. I used dry transfer decals
(letters and numbers) to the escutcheon which almost
matched the Motorola font. It looked pretty good.
The receivers & transmitters on those old radios were
pretty hot. With a new 6AK5, the sensitivity was .2mV
(provided you padded the front end with .5pF caps) and the
transmitter output was a solid 30 watts out and 35 was
possible if you were "blowin' the carbon out."

That was a long time ago and quite a different radio from
the Motorola Spectra that I use today. Thanks for the memories.

There was a AC version also, called an AC Utility, had a AC supply instead of the dc supply, also had a slope front integrated control panel. The first Twin V's were designed for 60 KHz channel spacing, after narrow banding came about (30 KHz) Moto had a "kit" that added a splatter choke to the TX and a new Permakey RX filter and modifications to the discriminator circuit to up the audio recovery. Rx crystals were usually RM-10 or R-27, the TX was RN-1 or RS-1.
RC

Hmmm. Isn't that strange that Harley-Davidson also has a similarly named ANCIENT design too!

Yeah, you know you've been around if this is your SECOND narrowband experience........


Jack

Most companies that used the AC Utility opted for
the THN6027A ventilated housing. It was a standard
10" mobile case with louvers cut into the top cover.
I have one in pristine condition that is crystalled up
on the NOAA 162.400 weather frequency. Those old
rigs had great sounding audio.

I contacted Motorola some years back - I had a T43GGV factory 2 freq model with serial number "1". Wanted to see if they wanted it for their museum.

All I got was static, and BS. So I tossed it in the dumpster about 2 years after that (must have been '96) when I ran out of room in the apartment for junk. It was still working, and was wideband.


Jack

My two bits worth:
I guess that I have been around a while, one of my first tasks when I went to work for Niles Radio in Tucson in '68 was installing the narrow band kits in these radios.

The "T" power was the same thing with a transistorized power supply.
I still have one of these on 462.625 in my garage.

There was also a consollete with the same guts as the AC utility.
There was one of these in a hotel switchboard in Hilo, about 32 years ago, that had one of the electrolytics blow up.
It was spectuctular! The security guard had to pry the operator out from behind a desk.
It blew the paper out of the speaker, and the plastic cover off of the clock.
the cans were bent around the cap location. This radio became our shop base for a while, since the hotel didn't ever want to see it again.

I remember that consolette. That's what was in the dispatch office of the cab company my mother and grandmother worked for when I was quite young. (Mom drove; I remember the Motrac head under the dash, and Grandma was a dispatcher.) I've often wondered if anyone would describe such a beast on here or if I'd ever see one on Ebay. Not yet on Ebay, but here first!

Thank you Bernie, another piece of the memory has been reassembled for me!

The T-Power in 10" case was the first "universal" configuration.
It could be mounted in the trunk with the traditional cable,
head & speaker or it could be dash-mounted if you used the
TCN6000 control head. That option continued through the
Motrac/Motran era up through the Mocom-30 & 70 series.
That's back in the days when Detroit built real cars and dashboards
were made of steel.

Does anyone remember the Motrac/Motran lamp dimmer heads?

My two bits worth:
Oh yes indeed I remember that little white square on the lower part of the head.

I used to wave my hand over one of these when I was showing one of these to another technician that was not aware of this feature.
Why is the light getting brighter?

As I recall we had problems with the lamp sockets. They would get tarnished, and the center contact would not make good contact. I would solder the rivits in the socket. Then there was the "protective diode" that would short for no apparent reason and blow fuses.

And the old cars not only had steel dashes, they had ROOM.

This things could eat your battery, when we had only a 30A generator.
Now days radios run on flash light batteries, and cars have 100A alternators.

My first mobile was a T-power. Hernia maker when you did the install. God those things were heavy.
Now we need to show him one with a "dynamotor" on board
Had a local bus company here that was still using them up to a few years ago.
You could hear the whirr of the dynamotor and watch the headlights dim when they keyed the mike.

Fowler

I'm probably younger than most of those remeniscing but my first motorola 440 mobile radio was a T power and it ate the battery on my Camaro and this was back in the early 1980's believe it or not, prior to that my radios were GE prog lines etc. I still remember those permakay filters and I still have one or two in my junk box just in case I need it for who knows what.


Mike

If you look around and ask a few questions, you might even find some of these units still in service at some of the smaller volunteer fire departments. With limited funding, they can't afford to replace them till they just flat stop working.

A trip to some of the out of the way New England depatments may even find some of the vibrator units still in the fire trucks. I know of at least one department that still had some of these working when I visited some 5 years ago.

Jim

And before the T-power was the twin vibrator, and before that was the 80/140 D dynamotor. 60 watt & 100 watt, low band. Used about a 2 gauge power wire because they were designed for 6 volt and would draw 200 amps +. My first boss blew the muffler off his car with one when he unthinking keyed the PTT when slowing down (In front of the PD station)

Sure would be cool to have the chrome scrolled /\/\otorola that was on the front of the Twin V consolette. Anybody got one of those?

Would be great to polish it up and hang that on the front of a modern radio.

Yeah, I remember tuning 41Vs, 80Ds and such. Climbing inside the trunk with tuning tools in 100 degree San Joaquin Valley summer days (plus the tubes warming it up as well), and pulling the trunk lid down to get decent SWR to the whine of the dynamotors and the buzz of the vibrators.

Doing an install and putting in the big ceramic fuse holder under the hood, straight off the solenoid was fun too. And, punching big holes with the Greenlees in fire walls, running the cables all the way back to the trunk under the carpet, kickplates, etc.

The don't build them like they used to, though.

One of our Motracs, installed in a pickup, went swimming when the truck sank to the bottom of a lake for a day. The radio was on when it went in. I pulled the drawer, blew trichlor all over it, and dried it out with an air hose. Then I took it inside the shop, and it powered up and everything worked just fine. Only a blown fuse.

Try that with a Maxtrac or a Spectra.

My first 6 meter mobile was a motorola 6 Volt 50D (I think) that used a pair of 807's and the crystal was ~1+ Mhz for 48X multiplier for 52.525. The xtal was some strange cut (AT ?) in an FT 243 case and the xtal would rattle inside - but that's how it was supposed to work - and it did. The beast in the trunk with dynamotor was a great Chan 2/3/4 TVI maker!
We used to drive around town in the evening and find someone watching TV that we could see from the mobile. Hit the PTT and the TV would go black. We could make them do the "TV dance" - They would get up to twiddle knobs or wack the TV and we would stop transmitting. They sit down - we key the mic - they get up, start going toward the TV - unkey - they stop, wait, sit down - key the mic again, etc. you get the pix. You could keep this going for about 10-15 min till they either changed the channel or shut off the TV. LMAO many times.... Great entertainment at night.
I still have working a 16VA mobile rcvr, vintage 1948, (factory mod for 12 Volts) that I added an AC supply to and it monitors the 146.760 local repeater. I acquired it ~1962 and have had it on and powered 24/7 since then with NO failures. That's 40+ years. Filaments are running at ~11.3 VAC because the power supply for the filaments used the 6.3 & 5 volt (rectifier) windings in series. B+ is std ~190Volts. Very wide band - made for 120 or 240 kHz hiband channel spacing of the day. Broadcast stations loved to use these rcvrs for remote or studio links cause the audio was hi-fi and the audio output xfmr has a 600 ohm winding in addition to the regular 4 ohm output. Hooked right up to the phone lines. Still running today!
Over time, I went the normal succesion route of 80/140 D's, TwinV's, T41/43's, T Power, T44(450Mhz), Motran,Motrac, Micor; FHTRU1-DL, P33, Handi Talkies, etc. I still have some old big copper PL reeds (TU-217?).