Motorola Minitor V problems

[K4LAU]

My VFD had many problems with the minitor pagers and poor service. We switched to the Watchdog by US Alert. After about a year of use we are very pleased. I can not comment on service because we have not needed it yet. They have a good warrenty and a super hot rx. They also have 5 ch capability with limited scan and stored voice. They are slightly larger than the M. Worth looking at!

[cdknapp]

I am currently testing a USAlert WatchDog pager. So far, I am very happy with everything about it. It cost at least $100 (each) less that the Minitor 5,is LOUD, is heavy duty/waterproof and comes with a 5 year warranty at no extra charge. Please IM me if you'd like additional information

[Avery93]

Well I did some further tests on the two bad pagers I have, and the results are interesting. It appears a component related to wideband (5.0 kHz deviation) reception has failed in these units.

When programmed to 154.600 wideband, in monitor mode, and using a PR400 on low power; the pagers will not open squelch at all with the radio just a few feet away. If I manually open squelch by holding down the reset button while transmitting, I can hear audio but it is so far down in the noise (and slightly distorted) that I can barely make out myself tapping on the microphone. If I transmit the tones programmed into the pager it still manages to alert as normal. I also noticed that when manually opening squelch, the white noise sounds low and muffled.

Using the same setup and simply un-checking "Wide band" in the pager software (and changing to narrowband on the PR400), the pagers receive normally. I tested this on both MURS channels that allow 5.0 kHz deviation and also an old fireground channel, and each time narrowband worked fine whereas the pagers were almost deaf on wideband. I also programmed the pagers to monitor the neighboring county's narrowband system (much busier than ours) with repeaters between 12 and 18 miles away. With one pager programmed narrowband and the other wide, the results were the same as when I tested them.

Anyone more familiar with the actual hardware design have any idea what would cause this?

Also, to the OP: What date code do your 'bad' pagers have? It is made up of the second and third letters in the serial number. Going through our files, it looks like every single one of our 12 "JC" dated pagers have had this same problem.

[KD2DLL]

Thats really weird. Have you tried to set the pagers as narrowband on your current system? Like just change the pagers to narrow and see if it will work with the wideband system? Thats quite interesting either way..

[Avery93]

Originally Posted by alexkaczor

Thats really weird. Have you tried to set the pagers as narrowband on your current system? Like just change the pagers to narrow and see if it will work with the wideband system? Thats quite interesting either way..

We have actually converted to narrowband since these pagers first went bad, I just didn't bother reprogramming them since at the time I thought they were completely deaf. They should work fine now, but I don't know how I would feel about issuing these pagers out since something is obviously broken.

I also forgot to mention that although I have never personally witnessed one going bad, our guys have said the pagers worked fine one day, and then the next they would just quit receiving anything but the alert. They also said they didn't drop them or anything beforehand.

[KD2DLL]

Yeah. Im not sure whats really causing the problem. Its quite interesting though. Best of luck with it all.

[gtaman]

Mine did that once. It was bad soldering on the speaker.

[nick223]

I change the store voice from dynamic to 120 seconds.

I have demo a watch dog pager. Great pager and service.