This past Saturday I had the opportunity to play with, okay, work with some new Mototrbo mobile radios at my part time job. These are some very nice looking radios and have a very solid feel to them…translation: they got a little weight to them. 🙂
They units were ordered with a third party option board to support LTR and Enhanced Passport. So along with the CPS to program the actual radio there is a separate program used to program the option board. From reading some things in the Help Files apparently third parties make the option boards for added functionality to the radios. And while downloading the updated CPS (they shipped us an older version with radios) I saw there is a CPS version for developers. There was no description for this version but it will be something I hope to look at later. I did a quick search on the regular Motorola Mototrbo site to see if there was any additional info about option boards, what is currently available, and who can (allowed) to add/create option boards or if there is a generic “dumb” option board that can be programmed for user specific applications.
Now I see why Amateur Radio operators have taken interest in these radios, even from just my (currently) short time with them. But there will be more work with these units as these are just the first of hopefully more units as well as the infrastructure as a migration path from LTR & Passport to Mototrbo for the customer. I wish there was a Mototrbo Amateur Radio repeater in this area so that I could really test these units out on the digital side. But I am sure that time will come. 🙂
Below (if this post via BlackBerry formats/posts correctly) is a photo of two of the Mototrbo mobiles. The top one is the UHF and the bottom one is the 800/900 MHz mobile. The display shows “Program OB” because the option board has not yet been programmed. This photo was taken before I installed the third party programming software to program the option board. There is a Zone in the radio specifically programmed just for the option board programming, though none of this programming is visible from within the CPS other than just the generic configuration of the Zone.
So hopefully over the next couple of months I will have a good working knowledge of Mototrbo and it capabilities.
Until next time….73s!