Vintage Motorola HT220's

[rescue161]

Back when I worked for the government, I used to get them by the box full. The owners would wait until they had a bunch before sending them in for repair. Oh, those were the days.

And the end-users still do the same thing. Nothing like waiting until most of their radios are broken to send them in for repair. Then they want them back as soon as possible. One of our worst offenders never does any user preventive maintenance on their portables. Once their season is over, they throw everything into a box until the start of the season the next year. They don't even attempt to do anything other than bring the box to us. Upon opening the box, we are greeted with salty beach sand and corroded battery terminals and salt water damaged radios. Every. Single. Year. And every year, all of their radios need to be completely rebuilt, which is very costly. User abuse at its finest.

 

[WPXS472]

These were from a plating shop. The atmosphere in there was pretty corrosive, so a lot came in with the BNC connector rotted off. I replaced a lot of them. Otherwise, nothing in particular went wrong. And, if it did, they were pretty easy to fix. We got in a whole bunch of Saber 1's, and there was a rash of synthesizer module failures. I think we installed at least 200 Syntor X9000's with the extra DESXL boxes during my time there.
All that is now gone, from what I understand. They were replaced by a low band UHF trunking system. I think it is something called BSTARS.

 

[Micorman]

Just a few general comments.
1. I have used Quartslab Crystals from the UK in my Motorola equipment and they work fine.
3 -week turnaround after payment.
2. I have been collecting Motorola land mobile equipment since I acquired a 2-channel VHF PT300 in 1970.
3. I worked at the Plantation/Fort Lauderdale Motorola plant in the mid-70s. For 4 years, I worked in the HT220
Final Test department for the VHF model. I've seen every model VHF HT220, both standard and SP (Special
Product) manufactured during my years there (1973-78).
4. I have 2 HT100s, single and 2-freq VHFs. One had a Chromeric Touch-Tone pad installed. The final transistor (PA)
was installed but the little 70ma battery could not provide the 310ma required in transmit. It was eventually removed.
5. The current drain in squelched was 4ma for CS and 7ma for PL radios. All at 15volts.
6. The HT220 was one of the most innovative radios ever made. It was the first to utilize ICs when it was introduced
in the late 60s. It is amazing that so many are still operational today.

 

[RFI-EMI-GUY]

Back when I worked in Schaumburg I found a discarded HT220 manual. It was for an SP product. VHF multi freq RX strapped to single TX, probably a voted multicast system. More interestingly was a sort of CVSD vocoder with several BCD rotary switches under a door just above the battery cover where a PL board would normally go. I wish I had kept the manual as it was definitely some early encryption product.