Tanks, guys, that gives me some places to start.
Duster, I am not the paying customer. I'm just a guy working for an entity that sometimes hands out radios and says "use these" and sometimes they don't work. Like one that just wanted to make a gentle squeal when it was turned on, which may have been a low battery alarm.
Trolling eBay for a manual eventually, good idea.
But I'd have to disagree with W5 on "end of service life". These are commercial/milspec quality radios, and old (1970-ish) USAF studies say that even if they are based on discrete components, a properly designed and built device can be expected to work for 100 years. Ten times that for ICs. Not all of them, but if you don't drop, immerse, or burn a commercial quality radio, it isn't unreasonable to expect 50-100 years of operation from everything except the battery. Of course they are being dumped in favor of digital, national band plan (funny how slowly that isn't happening), lithium battery powered units, whatever. But when they've been surplussed and passed on to other entities?
Guys, there are tens of thousands of these just recently starting new lives with zero-budget entities that have been making due with smoke signals until now. I think Moto's main reason for not releasing some of the docs (and software) into the public domain is simply that if they make it harder to use the old stuff, they'll increase the sales of the new stuff. Can't really fault 'em for that, even if I'd disagree.
If anyone does turn up a PDF of the user manual...love to hear about it. The "service manual" is online, but it isn't repairs and model specs I'm after. And there is one download site that promises the user manual for free. After you give them your email address and credit card information. (Which the FBI says usually goes to an eastern European criminal organization who will then be after your credit.)
Anyway, thanks to all. The tone, reverse, etc. I can check out by scanning from a "civilian" radio. At least I have an idea of what to look at now.