Been in radio since the mid ninties. Former Moto employee and current dealer executive here. Moto takes the trade ins to keep them out of the secondary market. Fewer bulk used radios in circulation means customers cannot buy bulk radios to keep their old fleets going and cannot pass them to other agencies/departments. Typically, they have been offering $400-500 for public safety (for p25 systems) and $100-125 per professional radio (for Mototrbo systems). Current Moto does not care about Hams, no like and no hate (they have purged/disbanded most of their internal hammy groups). They care about sales first, and service/support a distant second. They are a sales organization. Their sales staff is top notch. Their service and support organization is not great (this is where I worked). Moto has stopped the professional trade ins, due to supply chain/margin issues with Covid with no ETA on when it may come back, if ever. This is based solely on my experience at specific times/places and is not official policy with Moto. YMMV. TT
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Motorola Used Radio Rumors
- Thread starter CopperWhopper67
- Start date
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2018
- Messages
- 182
Louis Rossmann on YouTube is a great resource for, and a large advocate of, R2R. If you haven't checked him out, it's worth a look.
MTS2000des
5B2_BEE00 Czar
As Louis pointed out, with the FTC being reduced to a paper tiger, the corporations (true owners of this country) operate in a consequence free environment. The Magnus-Moss Warranty Act get violated to infinity, and nothing happens. The CPFB was gutted, there is no referee on the field.
If you think the R2R will ever really see the light of day in the USA, you are fooling yourself.
And that's what happens as an organization grows, or as growth flattens and stagnates. The salespeople have already taken over most of the management positions with little experience in actually managing products or people. They are great at moving the numbers which gets all the attention, but many also don't understand (or care about) the customer experience and post-sale support. Which of course leads to customers seeking alternatives with better support. Then most of the C-Suite that came from Sales is ousted as the company "Re-Imagines our market position." It's inevitable. Imagine a "sales driven organization" selling SaaS, when the Service part of that acronym is an alien concept.
A sales driven organizational model works well if you sell products that don't have any requirement for post-sales support. There's no service department or requirement for such if your business is toilet paper. Or any consumable, disposable, or low cost, throwaway item. If Motorola didn't make a radio costing more than a hundred dollars the service requirement would be zero. But obviously, durable and valuable goods that would be considered by the customer to be worth fixing, for a reasonable time after puchase, are a different story.
Just looking at the current radio offerings by both Motorola and Harris, and their service documentation, it's abundantly clear that they are trying to minimize the service side of the business, and doing it by essentially saying "This stuff is high density surface mounted component technology, all shielded, requiring expensive specialized tools and very specialized training so we don't support component level repairs" and in truth they're right about that. While it's not impossible to work on these current generation devices at the component level, it takes FAR more than your trusty Weller WTCPN solder station that served you well in the 80s and 90s!
On the software side, even the current Harris XL generation radios literally don't have a computer-based alignment procedure, at least not one that's accessible to the usual field technical staff. The adjustments that can be made are made within the standard RPM software, after you create a test personality that you load into the radio. And then, you have very limited control, over RF power output, and you can adjust the reference oscillator within the radio's own software itself, but beyond that point, you're limited to performance tests. If the radio fails the performance tests, it gets shipped back to Harris, and they presumably have alignment software and tools that are never seen by the local service center's technicians.
Service is a COST, not a revenue center, so you can expect that the manufacturers will try to engineer the ability to service their gear out of the product line as much as is possible.
Just looking at the current radio offerings by both Motorola and Harris, and their service documentation, it's abundantly clear that they are trying to minimize the service side of the business, and doing it by essentially saying "This stuff is high density surface mounted component technology, all shielded, requiring expensive specialized tools and very specialized training so we don't support component level repairs" and in truth they're right about that. While it's not impossible to work on these current generation devices at the component level, it takes FAR more than your trusty Weller WTCPN solder station that served you well in the 80s and 90s!
On the software side, even the current Harris XL generation radios literally don't have a computer-based alignment procedure, at least not one that's accessible to the usual field technical staff. The adjustments that can be made are made within the standard RPM software, after you create a test personality that you load into the radio. And then, you have very limited control, over RF power output, and you can adjust the reference oscillator within the radio's own software itself, but beyond that point, you're limited to performance tests. If the radio fails the performance tests, it gets shipped back to Harris, and they presumably have alignment software and tools that are never seen by the local service center's technicians.
Service is a COST, not a revenue center, so you can expect that the manufacturers will try to engineer the ability to service their gear out of the product line as much as is possible.
And, as for Sunny Communications, my employer also does some work at federal government installations, where they have stated the radios can't have Bluetooth or WiFi. Not just disabled, can't have that capability at all. I just purchased a hundred HT-1250's for firefighter use at these sites. It is like it is 1989 all over again. Or one of the Highlander movies where everything is old and wearing out. (We had a lot of chargers and other older /\/\ accessories, but they were not in the greatest condition, Sunny Comm has come in handy a few times now).
Yes, Motorola does take trade-ins on old equipment during certain promotions, or for a large-scale system revamp. Yes, the trade-ins go to the crusher. All that is true.
Never heard of Motorola cruising the second hand market to buy up radios and get them "off the street." That sounds like somebody's over active imagination.
Yes, I work for Motorola, so my info is valid.
Never heard of Motorola cruising the second hand market to buy up radios and get them "off the street." That sounds like somebody's over active imagination.
Yes, I work for Motorola, so my info is valid.