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Minitor VI pager

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WuLabsWuTecH

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I was talking about this in another thread, but it looks like the only real differences are (over the V):

- Extended Storage Time
- Message Management Buttons - Play, FF, Rewind
- Ability to use AAA batteries
- Some other minor updates

At least to me, there seems to be no real upgrade in terms of functionality.

Maybe some people on other departments will find these updates useful, but for us, I doubt any of them will be useful. Who really needs 16 minutes of stored dispatch? Even at a minute per dispatch, why would you need to go back to 16 runs ago? The message management buttons much be useful to someone on multiple departments trying to be able to use it like the old answering machines, but right now, even the stored voice models have some click feature to get to the message you want (as I am told, I do not own a stored voice minitor nor have I ever used one).

Overall, it's not really that impressive to me unless I am missing something. It seems like they put out an update for the sake of putting out an update since it had been so long since the last. I see no reason why these minor updates couldn't wait until the next major revision.
 

WISCOMM

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Minitor V last date to order is 28 FEB2014. So other then going with a Unication pager you likely will not have much choice going forward.
 

N0BDW

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Minitor V last date to order is 28 FEB2014. So other then going with a Unication pager you likely will not have much choice going forward.

Are you sure on that?

My county is still all low band for fire & EMS paging, so we can't yet move to the Minitor VI. They have a grant to move off low band within the next two years, but I imagine even after that paging will still be on LB for a while as departments make the transition.
 

WISCOMM

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Positive. The M6 has no plans to offer in LOW BAND, and the M5 LOW BAND will not be extended beyond the expected last ship date of 31 MAR 2014.

This question was specifically asked of Motorola during the introduction call.
 

SteveC0625

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Awesome. Well, thank you for the information. Will let my department know so they can plan accordingly.
Ben,

I talked this over with my Chief today. We think that Motorola may make remaining inventory of 5's available to a few big dealers that do business over the internet. If they do, new 5's could be available for some time to come. It's guess, but it seems logical. That would mean that within a couple of months, we'll know if new 5's can still be found. If they are, then your department and other LB agencies might have continued availability of the LB 5's until stock is depleted.

The other thing that sticks in the back of my mind is that the used market is going to change drastically as departments jump to the 6's. I don't know how other departments feel about buying used gear, but it is an option and there will be some good deals to be found. We talked about it a bit and did not rule it out.

Of course, this should also push down the prices of II's, III's, and IV's in the weeks and months ahead.
 

WuLabsWuTecH

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Ben,

Of course, this should also push down the prices of II's, III's, and IV's in the weeks and months ahead.

I don't know that this is necessarily true and I'll give you my reasoning as to why.

1) I don't think people are going to jump at the Minitor 6's when they don't offer that much more functionality. (See previous post I made above as to why I think this). My department went to Minitor V's and to be honest, they only did this to be narrowband compliant. Granted we don't used Stored Voice which is where the major updates are, but there really is no real push to upgrade everyone from the 5's to the 6's. I think that some departments will have units break, or just older 3's and 4's that need to be replaced, or who will go off low band or something else that necessitates and upgrade and if they then at that point get 6's (since nothing else is available) then they might drop their 5's and older onto the market, but it could be a few years before people start to need to replace their 4's and 5's en masse.

2) I think we'll see something more like the "iPhone effect" take hold where these units start to hold their value for longer periods of time. As the 6's become available, the early adopters will drop some 5's on the market, but they can still get some decent value for them and I don't expect the 5's to go too far below what the eBay average is right now. Granted it's very hard to compare apples to apples since there are so many models of the 5, but for a functional set (pager, battery charger) you're looking at about $125-150 for lower end (no stored voice, single channel) to about $250 for higher end (dual channel, stored voice).

The iPhones hold their values because there are some people who don't mind having the second to newest generation since there aren't that many differences between the newest one and the second-to-newest one. I think that like SteveC suggested, it is highly likely that some departments will be willing to get the 5's thereby keeping demand up with supply. Similar to iPhones, the lower end ones will drop in price, but I think the 5's and to a certain extent the 4's will hold close to their current values (maybe say, 90% of the current averages?).
 

WuLabsWuTecH

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Motorola MINITOR VI Two-Tone Voice Pager - ShopWiscomm

$999 for a voice pager?! You have got to be kidding me. I think departments will start switching to other brands at that price.
That looks like a placeholder listing. The options aren't all even there yet (frequency bands and such) so I'm guessing they just put it up for advertising but didn't want to write "out of stock" or didn't have that capability so they just put in a dummy price. There is no way that Motorola would jac up the price 2-3x what it is for the Minitor V with only small improvements!
 

firefive76

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That looks like a placeholder listing. The options aren't all even there yet (frequency bands and such) so I'm guessing they just put it up for advertising but didn't want to write "out of stock" or didn't have that capability so they just put in a dummy price. There is no way that Motorola would jac up the price 2-3x what it is for the Minitor V with only small improvements!

I'd sure hope that price is incorrect!
 

SteveC0625

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That looks like a placeholder listing. The options aren't all even there yet (frequency bands and such) so I'm guessing they just put it up for advertising but didn't want to write "out of stock" or didn't have that capability so they just put in a dummy price. There is no way that Motorola would jac up the price 2-3x what it is for the Minitor V with only small improvements!
Exactly my reaction. Since the pricing has not been released, it has to be a placeholder sort of thing. Wiscomm usually has pretty fair pricing.
 

fetcho

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That looks like a placeholder listing. The options aren't all even there yet (frequency bands and such) so I'm guessing they just put it up for advertising but didn't want to write "out of stock" or didn't have that capability so they just put in a dummy price. There is no way that Motorola would jac up the price 2-3x what it is for the Minitor V with only small improvements!

It is a placeholder, everything for the VI is priced at $999.99; from batteries to standard chargers.
 

WuLabsWuTecH

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They can do 5 channels, but only scan 2.

Once again, not seeing how that is a useful feature. So that would mean something like A scans 1 and 2, B for 3, C for 4 and D for 5. Which would then result in having to choose only one type of alert for all of them and not being able to separate out tones. What use could a PAGER have for 5 channels?

Two channels for 2 departments makes sense if they are on different systems. I can even see a third if there is an alternate dispatcher. But 5???

And I think the scan works on a 0.25 second latency? So since tones can be as short as 1 second, unless they changed the latency, I don't think you can ever get more than 3 frequencies scanned and have reliable alerting.
 

evfd1625

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I think the selector knob goes all the way to "h", but I think the labelling scheme is backwards, if you look at the pictures of the top.
 

SteveC0625

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And I think the scan works on a 0.25 second latency? So since tones can be as short as 1 second, unless they changed the latency, I don't think you can ever get more than 3 frequencies scanned and have reliable alerting.
It think that's a good analysis. We have a number of our V's setup to scan two channels with tone alerting on both; one for our ambulance and one for our fire department. We roll together on some calls (MVA's, structure fires, Deep woods rescues, etc.) But mostly it's one or the other. Since we are both relatively low call volume agencies, we haven't had any missed pages due to scanning issues.

I'm not sure how 5 channel capacity but only two channel scan is going to work out. I'm reserving judgement on the until I can examine the PPS.
 

WuLabsWuTecH

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I think the selector knob goes all the way to "h", but I think the labeling scheme is backwards, if you look at the pictures of the top.

And at this point, you're buying a scanner... Don't get me wrong, these bells and whistles and switches and knobs can be useful for certain applications, but now you're just buying a really expensive scanner with a limited function set. But maybe I'm just a simple person. I want my pager to alert me to runs, my radio to be able to talk to others (i'm ok with a complex radio) and my scanner to scan and listen to tac channels and whatever else piques my interest.

Unless you're programming in firegrounds or weather channels, I don't see what use the 3 non-scanned channels are, and if you do want to listen to those, a scanner is going to get much better reception. Also, your fireground and whatever other channels would have to be within the same bandplan as your dispatch channel (which ours are not).

It think that's a good analysis. We have a number of our V's setup to scan two channels with tone alerting on both; one for our ambulance and one for our fire department. We roll together on some calls (MVA's, structure fires, Deep woods rescues, etc.) But mostly it's one or the other. Since we are both relatively low call volume agencies, we haven't had any missed pages due to scanning issues.

I'm not sure how 5 channel capacity but only two channel scan is going to work out. I'm reserving judgement on the until I can examine the PPS.

I'm assuming you have it setup such that once it alerts on one channel, it says open on that channel until the "squelch" command is given (either by auto timeout or by user action)? If so, the only time you would miss a dispatch is if another one is already in progress so even if you did miss a dispatch, it would be a non-issue right? Last time I checked, it's pretty hard to ride a squad and an engine at the same time!

Of course our fire and EMS are on the same channel with different tones so no one really uses the second channel for anything except if they had an extra ABCD open in which case I know some guys that programmed in weather or something else they want to listen to (they tried to get fireground but couldn't because it's on a different band plan).

And what do you plan to use the other 3 channels for?
 

SteveC0625

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I'm assuming you have it setup such that once it alerts on one channel, it says open on that channel until the "squelch" command is given (either by auto timeout or by user action)? If so, the only time you would miss a dispatch is if another one is already in progress so even if you did miss a dispatch, it would be a non-issue right? Last time I checked, it's pretty hard to ride a squad and an engine at the same time!
You are correct. The call volume up here is small enough that the chances of missing a page because of an alert on the other channel is right there between slim and now. I am EMS only so I have my pager set up with Priority Scan on the EMS channel if I need to be certain I don't miss a call. For walking around, I have it set on Normal Scan to listen to everything. If our fire tones are going out, it's unlikey that our EMS tones are too because of the way they have stacked pages set up at dispatch. They are sequential if it is a Fire & EMS run. Otherwise, they'd put out the entire EMS dispatch followed by a separate Fire dispatch if it is two different jobs.

It all works fine in a low call volume county, but would fail miserably in a high call volume environment like the one where I spent my dispatch career.
 

evfd1625

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Right now, I use a U.S.Alert Watchdog 5 channel pager. I have 2 different EMS jobs and am a volunteer firefighter, so I have one channel for each. I have very little, if any use for the scan feature, as they are separated by such physical distance the pager wouldn't even be able to receive any of the other channels programmed in. I could only see it being an advantage if the responder works several different stations/jobs and needs independent alerting for only the one they are at at the time. It could also be beneficial for a multi station agency with different tones for each station to have spares or backup pagers programmed with multiple stations to be loaned out without requiring reprogramming.
 
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