Old ht's. worth keeping?

Few years back a guy gave me 2 of these with a charger. Haven't transmitted on them but they power up OK.

He seemed to act like they were something special or unique. Can't find much info on the web about them.

Anybody have a clue? Trash or treasure?

 

I go back to the Gonset radio's of the 1950's, everything made in the US, tube, and the 2 meter one cost over $200 in 1956 and my base pay in the USAF was $77.10 a month, so I never owned one. There was a reason that a lot of the older hams built their own stuff or modified surplus. You can say what you wish, but the price, quality, features, and efficiency of the modern transceiver is beyond anything that even the military could buy in 1956 and cheap to boot.

 

Can't get cheaper than free unless someone pays you to take em. Sure there's better and cheaper stuff but it is the kind of stuff that would not likely be in the budget for most preppers until way, way down on the lists so take it as a windfall and realize that even with 1950s technology, you got a potentially useful tool.

 

Honestly not sure what I would do with them. Doubt I'll ever spend the time trying to get them reprogrammed. Thinking I should sell them on eBay.

 

Hmm. Good point. These radios feel very sturdy. Bet they could take a beating. I'll check on the reprogramming.

 

Good well built radios that were capable of trunking operation. They will put out a solid 4 watts all day long, and make a pretty good head cracker when needed. Like BT said, they won't bring much on the market but will outlast the Chinese crap by a factor of 10.

 

Keep them around but don't spend any real money on them.

 

Well. After a bit of research it looks like I won't be able to reprogram them. At least not without alot of brain damage. Can't find the right cable, programming software requires an old DOS based computer and looks like a converter box of some kind is needed between the radio and computer.

Am I missing something? Any easier way of doing it?

 

A RIB is a given...but dos can be found online and run in a virtual machine.

Any clue what frequencies are in them currently?

 

No idea what frequency. I could fire up the analyzer and find out. Looks like only two pins on the radio port are used for the interface. I have a Kenwood programming cable that I use with chirp software. Wonder if it could be adapted.

 

They're interesting old rigs and probably built like a tank...but ask yourself if it's worth all that hassle just to have an amateur band HT. Assuming you get it to work on an amateur band, does it even have a PL or repeater split capability? Otherwise all you've got is a really nice vintage simplex radio. Yay!

If you just want to tinker around then ok cool, go for it. If you want a practical, working radio, then go get yourself a nice Yeasu or Kenwood or Icom HT (if you don't have one already) that out of the box will do 10x whatever is in that Motorola brick, without having to jump through hoops.

 

I'd be surprised if you can get into them much less make them useful. I wouldn't test with out some kind of antenna and a frequency counter .
I've seem commercial Motorola radios that were resin filled ,you could drive on them with a truck and not hurt them .
But they were not modifiable .
Some of the early sheriff's 800 megs were strictly repeater/cell dependent and could not communicate to one another without the repeater, later on that was changed .but the were the worst piece of equipment the sheriffs department had ever been talked into .
Just because something is new doesn't make it better.
the claim was the no ne had the technology to listen in ,and one of the hams that happen to be at the presentation disagreed with them and provided them a read out of the previous days conversations He had recorded .
The officials ignored the ham and saddled the selves with those useless bricks.
On searches we resorted to ham radios ,those of us with license .
I'm not saying that is what you got It's just Motorola builds custom specs, and not with in ham license parameters necessarily.

 

Problem is, anything over 75 mhz processor will turn them into a brick. The radio can't handle it, says the man with a few parts radios on the shelf that have been bricked.