Commercial Equipment's first life

[wayoverthere]

So, short version: for those of you with surplus commercial equipment in your box of goodies, do you know (or have you looked into) what and/or where those radios came from?

 

Color me curious...the catalyst was that I picked up a couple surplus Vertex HT's from ebay...400-470MHz range, and part 90 certified, so good compromise to cover both GMRS, and have some ham coverage for when i cross that bridge.

 

I've been picking through what they will and won't let me do, but hey seem to be pretty restricted, with all but one of the presets looking to be set up for some form of digital.  Poking through the names of the presets, though, seems to indicate they're set up for a small town school district out of NY State, which fits with having come via a radio shop in NY state.  Most of the presets seem to be elementary school names, with "MS Admin" and "HS Admin" thrown, along with "Trans" and "Facilities". There's a couple more with a "L/F" prefix that the purpose seems obvious, but what they belong to, less so.

 

With a location, digging on the frequencies in use became a bit easier, and info seems to point to them being set up on a MotoTRBO system (which seems to fit with the 'group call' option i'm seeing with the presets). 

 

Anyone else done this? Found anything interesting if you have?

 

 

[WRAK968]

I've done it a couple times, one radio came from a facility I do not wish to mention (its run by a mouse) and had an extensive turbo system. Another radio came from a fire marshell in ohio and it still had the encryption codes installed. When I purchased a lot of 380's they all seem to have come from a wildland fire fighting team.

[Lscott]

So, short version: for those of you with surplus commercial equipment in your box of goodies, do you know (or have you looked into) what and/or where those radios came from?

 

The first thing I do when I receive a used radio is read and save to original code plug. 

 

Just about every commercial Kenwood HT radio I've worked with has two areas for storing an internal message, one of which is password protected.

 

Out of a dozen or so used HT's I got only one had that message blocked filled in. That radio came from a university located in New Jersey based on the name in the message. Also based on a name and phone number in the message it was setup to work in conjunction with a certain company's line of wireless two way emergency call boxes.

 

I always put my Ham call sign and home address in the internal message block for any code plug I write to a commercial radio with that feature. Additionally if the radio has a LCD display, typical 16 channel radios don't have any, I have my Ham call sign displayed at power up as an added ID feature. 

 

One other feature the radios have is an electronic serial number which can't be erased or changed through any software I've been able to find. The radio programming software lets one read the model number, firmware version and serial number from the radio, even if its password locked. So far I haven't seen a radio where somebody attempted to remove the external serial number tag indicating the radio might be stolen.  

[axorlov]

One of my tk-880 came with channels labeled like Sheriff-1, Sheriff-2, FD-tac and such. Seller was from Louisiana. It also has a scrambler board inside. I wiped all the programming and did not think of it.

Good idea to put Ham callsign to message block, just in case.

[WRAK968]

The first thing I do when I receive a used radio is read and save to original code plug. 

 

Just about every commercial Kenwood HT radio I've worked with has two areas for storing an internal message, one of which is password protected.

 

Out of a dozen or so used HT's I got only one had that message blocked filled in. That radio came from a university located in New Jersey based on the name in the message. Also based on a name and phone number in the message it was setup to work in conjunction with a certain company's line of wireless two way emergency call boxes.

 

I always put my Ham call sign and home address in the internal message block for any code plug I write to a commercial radio with that feature. Additionally if the radio has a LCD display, typical 16 channel radios don't have any, I have my Ham call sign displayed at power up as an added ID feature. 

 

One other feature the radios have is an electronic serial number which can't be erased or changed through any software I've been able to find. The radio programming software lets one read the model number, firmware version and serial number from the radio, even if its password locked. So far I haven't seen a radio where somebody attempted to remove the external serial number tag indicating the radio might be stolen.  

Oh it can be done I found out. I had a radio which half bricked itself and wouldn't let me "read/write" from the radio anymore. Turns out if you have a special motorola tech software you can rewrite the S/N, the frequency range, and a few other things in the radio. We changed the S/N to 111111111 and it suddenly let us read from the radio again, so we returned it to the labeled SN and haven't had the issue since.

 

I do put my GMRS/Ham call in the power-on message. This way if I am stopped by a cop or security officer, I can simply turn the radio off and on and show that I am the owner.

[Lscott]

Oh it can be done I found out. I had a radio which half bricked itself and wouldn't let me "read/write" from the radio anymore. Turns out if you have a special motorola tech software you can rewrite the S/N, the frequency range, and a few other things in the radio. We changed the S/N to 111111111 and it suddenly let us read from the radio again, so we returned it to the labeled SN and haven't had the issue since.

 

I do put my GMRS/Ham call in the power-on message. This way if I am stopped by a cop or security officer, I can simply turn the radio off and on and show that I am the owner.

So it apparently can be done with Motorola radios, useful info. I have Kenwood. I haven't really looked that hard but none of the radio programming software I can get my hands on allows changing the serial number even with the so-called "engineers" or "dealer" keys. I have forced a radio to a different "market code" something the software says if you get wrong the first time can't be changed, well I did several times on the same radio using the "engineers" key. So much for that.

 

The problem is Kenwood is disabling the engineers function in the software for the newer radios so even if you had the right key it won't allow you to change certain things. I had to track down a special version of the software for an analog/NXDN radio to unlock the read write password protection a few weeks back for recent radio I got. I was able to write a blank code plug to it thus disabling all password protection. The radio sold real cheap likely because even the dealer that sold it to me couldn't unlock it.