[Motorola] Car Phones of the 1970's

[Geoff Fors]

Jack + others:

I am curious when NY Telephone went to IMTS, and if any of the IMTS systems
back on the east coast are still on the air.   Here in California, Pacific
Telephone didn't convert to IMTS until 1982, and by then cellular phones
were already starting to be marketed.  They pulled the plug on IMTS here in
1995.  Con-Tel and GTE lasted a few years longer with IMTS but they are gone
now as well.

During the MTS years here, those TLD1100 "MJ" VHF car phones had little
cardboard sleeves surrounding the pushbutton switch shafts so that
subscribers couldn't depress the "H" or "R" IMTS feature buttons !  When
IMTS started up, the Pacific Telephone shop just took out the cardboard
sleeves and changed the phone number to a 7 digit (versus 5 digit) one.  The
MJ phones used out here were the TLD1100 versions, which did not offer a
"Party" button for revertive call operation (unlike the TLD1220), but
instead had an "Aux" button to blow your car horn when the phone rang.
Also, there were still many of the older MTS- only heads in use up to 1982,
which were those black metal ones with the row of clear illuminated
pushbuttons representing the channel selection.

Another weird thing - Motorola appears to have supplied the first rotary
dial heads, i.e. the MJ style, with some of the UHF T1414 car phones, and
with UHF channel designators instead of VHF ("Q" series channels rather than
"YJ," "JL" etc.).  However, the VHF head is 11 channels while the UHF needs
to be 12.  Evidently you had to give up one channel if you wanted to use
roaming operation with that head...

Geoff WB6NVH