One such radio manufacturer that I know about charges a minimum $125 fee for any non-warranty radio work. In many cases, the remaining shops can only perform minor repairs, with radios with any more significant problems having to be sent to the manufacturer for repair. In my particular region, probably 2/3's of the radio shops have disappeared in the last 10-15 years. One final issue-across all makes of two-way radios, much of the local dealer sales/repair network is rapidly disappearing. One Class 1 railroad radio tech told me the every one his railroad's radios has the railroad 'initials' engraved on the radio, and that, if those initials are on a used radio being sold on the secondary market, it is almost certainly a stolen one. The buyer doesn't often know if the radio has been physially abused, been repaired in the past, is totally functional, or potentially 'hot' (stolen). Buying used is also always somewhat risky. Going back to the OP's dilemma, if the radio has suffered a major failure, usually trying to repair it isn't worth the cost. The Motorolas often won't perform any better than many other analog radio models, and won't do NXDN digital. As related to me be people in the know in the railroad communication end of things, that is a main reason that the AAR recommended NXDN (not P25) as the 'standard' for future railroad digital radio-better performance and less expensive equipment being the perceived advantages.įor railfans, buying a Motorola radio, used or new, these days offers little advantage. They 'sold' P25 digital as the be-all-end-all solution to government agencies, despite the fact that P25 isn't necessarily as robust or feature-laden as other digital platforms even though it could be much more expensive. Today, Motorola's big radio business is with government agencies.

Motorola also was pretty proprietary about a lot of their stuff, so getting radios serviced could be expensive.

In my opinion, that is not so much true for the last few years. The old Motorola 'brick' portables, for example, were real tanks and could take a tremendous amount of physical abuse.

Yes, Motorolas used to be the gold standard in two-way radios. While I can't supply a specific answer to the OP's question, I'll talk a bit in general about Motorola radios.

How to program motorola mcs2000