[Motorola] Motorola HT Family Tree ?

[Geoff Fors]

I think there were quite a few models of radios used by the RVN police
forces.  The crazy thing is, a great quantity of the off-the-shelf models
were actually leased out by Motorola and then hauled back here.  That's one
reason there were Motorola techs on site, to maintain the leased radio
fleet.  There were leases with both the US Government and the local
governments, at least according to the paperwork and tags.  I bought some of
that leased equipment when it got back here in 1970, it was primarily D33BAT
front mount "Industrial Dispatcher" gear which had been in service from
1964-69.  One of them had a bullet hole right through the top housing but it
worked fine.  I was told they had them in Jeeps, between the seats. The
frequencies were in the 148 and 149 MHz range, some were refurbished and
some were not.  The big dealers such as Mann Communications, Gregory
Electronics, Spectronics and (I think) Western Mobile Telephone bought the
rest.  I have wondered if there aren't old photos somewhere showing these
radios in use in Saigon and surrounding cities.

The militarized models such as the Hallicrafters Village radios and the
Z-1000 seem to have been gifts and never came back.  I saw the Motorola
Z-1000's being used in either Uganda or Somalia about 1972 by military
police (too many years and I can't remember.)  About the only way to tell
them apart from the Hallicrafters radios is that the Motorolas have an
SO-239 connector on the top for a 1/4 wave whip, while the Hallicrafters
ones have a telescoping whip on stand-off brackets running up the sides.

I posted a message here a few weeks ago about some strange PT-300 lunchboxes
on 29.4/26.8 Mhz, and it appears now that those were more of the off-lease
stuff which came back from Vietnam or Thailand.  There must have been a
mobile relay system on those channels at the time.  There were also some
weird military PT-300's with a Z- prefixed model number, which were 40 MHz
low band radios.  I don't know what was special about them.

I bet there's still a lot of gear over there, now making the flea market
circuit.  The basement of the old US Embassy in Saigon has a heap of grungy
looking R-390 receivers piled up.  There was a photo of them in QST Magazine
some years ago.  When I lived in Shanghai the flea markets were even turning
up WWII Command Set components and BC-348 bits from the pre-1949 China
days...

It's too bad some of the really awful two way radios couldn't have all been
shipped to SE Asia and forgotten, specifically the GE Voice Commanders,
Accent 450's and Pocket Mates, and maybe some Kaar Expediters and Gonset
G151's thrown in for good measure...

That might be a topic for another discussion...What is the most awful two
way radio ever made?
GE in the 1960's certainly worked hard at winning the contest.  It's hard to
think of an older Motorola radio which was awful, although the FMTRU-5V
"Dispatcher" taxi radios probably rate at least an honorable mention...

Geoff
WB6NVH