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Mocom 70 control head - 12 channel

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k9veteran

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Hello,



Does anyone know where I can find, or the best place to look, for a MOTOROLA MOCOM 70, 12 CHANNEL control head ?



I need this ítem for a 70´s era emergency vehicle restoration Project.



Here is a photo of what I am looking for.



THANKS !
 

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SteveC0625

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I know I gave you some info over on ELB, but I'll offer a bit more here. I worked in the two-radio manufacturing industry from '69 to 74 at the old RF Communications. I can tell you at that time that selector knobs like that one were custom made in small quantities for special orders. The clear plastic dial could easily be silk screened with any number of letters or numbers needed, and they mated up nicely with knobs like the ones /\/\ used on the MoCom and Motrac heads. Everybody used them at one time or another for that exact reason, not just the radio industry. If you were to disassemble one, I strongly suspect that you would find that the channel knob and back light would be installed differently than the other components; holes drilled instead of punched in the face plate and housing, shop modified wiring, etc.

I would suggest that you consider finding a single channel, no accessory MoCom 70 head and then looking for the switch components separately. Believe it or now, knobs with dials like that used to be all over the ham flea markets and used/surplus electronics stores. A 12 position rotary switch and appropriate back light should not be hard to find at all. The /\/\ style knobs are plentiful.
 

k9veteran

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Thanks for the info. I have seen two heads, one on a Mocom another on a Motrac, unfortunatly, the owners want way over market Price for them, considering they are for ¨Display¨ purposes only.

I will look around for a Motrac single head and see what I can find.

THANKS, and see ya on ELB !
 

k9veteran

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Still looking

Hello, still looking for a 12 channel control head like I posted 2 yrs ago. If you see one at a swap meet, PLEASE get the sellers info for me. THANKS and Happy New Year.
 

ramal121

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Well I'll comment, and that would be good luck and best wishes. A 12 channel Motrac/Motran/Mocom will be about as rare as hens teeth. I imagine someone with a dire need would be the only one to order some and Motorola would have to SP a design to make it work. This would equate to many $$$.

The reason is for one the cost of putting 24 different channel elements into a mobile designed for one or two freqs. Very expensive.

Reason two is there is not enough wires in the control cable to address 12 channels directly. A BCD switch needed to be used along with a decoder that could output at least 12 discrete lines.

Not impossible but the design group in those days bent over backwards to make a sale. I have never seen a radio of that vintage with 12 channels, but have run across Mitreks modded to something like 12 or 16 channel. Same idea.

So all I'm saying is if you do find what you are looking for may be museum quality. Unless you can piece something together as Steve mentions.

God speed.
 

RBMTS

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It's been a long, long time since I worked on Mocom's but as I remember, the 12 position heads simply jumbled combinations of the 4 pairs of RX/TX channel elements. I don't recall any SP versions of Mocoms that had more than 4 channels. The channel expansion didn't happen until the Micor generation of radios (can't remember if they went up to 12 or 15 pairs of elements). Boy was that expensive at the time.
 

garys

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I have two. Those were used on the Mark 12 UHF radios. Which were converted from UHF mobile phones. I used to have a full radio but the T/R unit disappeared at some point. They were enormous radios because they were full duplex. They originally came with telephone style handsets.

Boston and Chicago used them, and I'm sure other agencies did as well. Production started in the early '70s.
 

garys

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A correction and some more information. The UHF Mark 12 radios predated the IMTS MK phones, not the other way around. Motorola designed the radios to market to mostly big city departments and capitalize on the newer UHF frequencies. As I said in my other post Boston and Chicago bought them, as did other cities. This move started in the 1960s, not the 1970s. I think it was the early 1970s when Boston moved from a two channel VHF system to the 7 channel system that they still use today, although they've added a few more channels. Their radios had 8 channels, with channel 8 being the Massachusetts Capitol Police. That agency has been gone almost 25 years and Boston took over that channel along with some other 460 channels that agencies relinquished.

As I recall, the radios had on TCXO per frequency with some sort of offset generator (for lack of a better term). They looked nothing like the TCXOs used on the regular Mocom radios.

I got mine when Boston was disposing of all of their older radios in the mid 1980s. They had hundreds of Mark 12s and were dumping them somewhere. I asked about them and was given the two heads and chassis unit. No speakers, no handsets.

If anyone is really interested, I'll take some pictures and post them here when I get back home next week. I wish I had the control head cable and the chassis. Maybe the friend I gave them to to see if the unit could be converted to a ham repeater still has them, but I don't think he does.

If you go here, you can find some more information and see a picture of the chassis. Scroll about 2/3 of the way down to where it talks about 1968 and the introduction of UHF.



Well I'll comment, and that would be good luck and best wishes. A 12 channel Motrac/Motran/Mocom will be about as rare as hens teeth. I imagine someone with a dire need would be the only one to order some and Motorola would have to SP a design to make it work. This would equate to many $$$.

The reason is for one the cost of putting 24 different channel elements into a mobile designed for one or two freqs. Very expensive.

Reason two is there is not enough wires in the control cable to address 12 channels directly. A BCD switch needed to be used along with a decoder that could output at least 12 discrete lines.

Not impossible but the design group in those days bent over backwards to make a sale. I have never seen a radio of that vintage with 12 channels, but have run across Mitreks modded to something like 12 or 16 channel. Same idea.

So all I'm saying is if you do find what you are looking for may be museum quality. Unless you can piece something together as Steve mentions.

God speed.
 

RFI-EMI-GUY

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For parts of that vintage, you might want to PM K9MDM. He closed up his shop MDM Radio this last summer when he retired, and the remainder of the stock was donated to a school if I recall.

Anyway, back in those days, before SYNTOR, Motorola would run a separate control cable conductor for every channel. No Binary, even for 12F Micors. If they had to expand channels in a radio, an add on board for the additional channel elements was not unheard of.
 

k9veteran

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We used the 460mhz band for the PD here in Dallas. Every police vehicle had 12 channel Mocom 70s. Only exception was the Harley Motorcycles. On a guess, I'd say Dallas had over 1000 trunk mounted radios
 

garys

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I don't recall what BPD motorcycles used for radios, but it wasn't those beasts. PM me and we'll see if we can work out a deal for one of my control heads.
 

RFI-EMI-GUY

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Motorola made a small 15 watt radio that was crystal controlled, was a later model radio in the size of the Mocom 35 or Dispatcher. It also had remote mount capability, about 12 channels and used channel elements and solid state PL filters. I had one in UHF set up on GMRS and added a unique home brewed Pulsar handset type control head. I don't think I have seen one since, but it was probably a Motorcycle radio drawer unit.

Edit: it was an MCR-100 and that same nomenclature that was later reused for a repeater.
 
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n2hbx

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Seems like I recall a similar control head used on an early Micom HF marine radio.

Larry
 

radioman2001

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The control head in the picture was used on a number of M products at the time (mid 1970's to early 80's). there were the SP Mocom 70's built for Con-Ed (a local utility) in NYC which had a secondard deck mounted in the middle of the radio for the extra TCXO's. That head was also used on the Mark12 UHF mobile radio used by New Haven Conn PD and probably others. The 25 watt mobile was a knock off of a UHF Mobile telephone of that era, 12 channels with a single TCXO per channel with a master offset crystal. Instead of a duplexer used for the phone model a filter trap was used for TX/RX operation. They were big and green but worked, and I still have a few some where, I kept them for the power transistors since they were the same as the ones used in the Motrac (MSY) repeater. I sold off a brand new head and cable years ago.

The TLD was the VHF version of mobile phone line, they still had a tube final, 5894 and "T" power if memory serves me correct, and I believe it predates the Mark 12. I might dig up mine and look for build dates. Serviced hundreds of them from 1979 through the mid 80's. We converted them from the old Pulsar I head to the Harris 2000's, which was basically gutting the radio by removing the MTS/IMTS board and installed the new control pack on the top of the radio case.

Ah the simplicity of the old days.
 

RFI-EMI-GUY

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Seems like I recall a similar control head used on an early Micom HF marine radio.

Larry

I think you are correct Larry. I recall seeing those and I tried to find a picture on Google of old Micom but too much to sort through.
 

garys

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The part number on the two that I have is TCN6127A. I'll get some pictures posted over the weekend. One has MOCOM on the escutcheon, the other has Mark 12. Neither is as clean as the one in the picture.
 

arlo

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ELB?

There was a mention of a web sit called ELB. What is the full name of the site?
 
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