Batboard

Programmed my first M4 pager today. Pretty straightforward once you know about the Read Mode.

What is the use of the Call Options: eg code R130, R486 etc?

Thanks

The call options determine the paging formats allowed. They are as follows;

R168 - user defined, all fields open
R468 - A - B, A - C Long B & Long C
R130 - A - B, A - C & Long C
R97 - A - B & A - C
STD - A - B
R134 - A - B, Long B & Long C
R138 - A - B & Long B
R362 - A - B & Long C
R177 - A - B & C - B
R60 - A - B, C - B & Long B
R621 - A - B & Long A

If your system uses more than three diferent tones, you would use R168, if your system uses three or less, one of the above options would most likely work.

Thanks Dave, when they say "user" do they mean dealer, not customer?
I also wonder if Moto reads this stuff- but I doubt it.

User means "user defined". For instance, in your read sheet, the "SYSTEM" can be set to Motorola, GE, Plectron, Fast Plectron or "User". If you were to set your pager programming to do a "MOTOROLA" system and endered a Tone "A" of 707.3, the tone would stay as entered. Then if you went back and changed the "SYSTEM" to "User", first the tones would blank out, now if you enter tone A to 707.3, when you tab over to the next field, tone A could change to something close to that freq, but not necessarily that one. User defined is just what it sounds like, but there are limitations.

And yes people from Motorola DO read this board. I've made no secret of the fact that I am ONE of them.

Well, lets hope they don't retire you anytime soon. We may need your expertise again.
In fact, today we asked for a tone test to make sure the M4's work. They work just fine on my service monitor. They work fine on dispatch tones, except they don't store the voice message. This is probably because dispatch lets the carrier drop between the tone-out, and the actual call description. Is there something I missed in the SW to tell it to ignore a n-second gap between tones and voice?
Thanks

Try revert-n for 10-15 seconds. This allows the dispatcher 10-15 seconds from the carrier drop from the tones, to speak the message.

One warning about "user" option.

You can't make multiple sequences with the same A tone.
Example:
A/B
879.0/832.2
879.0/707.3

The pager doesn't alert the 2nd group 100%. When the pager hears a tone to decode, it seems to scan down the list to either match or not match and continue. If it sees a match, it waits for the second tone. If that also matches, it alerts. If it doesn't match, no alert.

The problem is, it doesn't look for other matching A tones if B failed. So in the above example, if tone B being translitted is 707.3, it won't know to look for the 2nd group because it's "stuck" on the first group.

Hope this helps!
tpg

TPG, the revert-n did the trick. Thanks for all the info.
BTW will this M4 SW and HW work for the M3?

the revert-n did the trick.

Glad to see that the revert-n worked for you. Likewise the Delayed N option (again with a 10 to 15 sec delay) would work.

Yes the hardware & software for the Min IV will work with the Min III also.

Dave, I don't understand the difference between revert-n and delayed-n, can you explain?
thanks