[Motorola] Awful radios

[Geoff Fors]

Yes, that would have been the Voice Commander.  The Voice Commander I,  had
some quick heat subminiature wire lead tubes in it but I never saw any and I
think they are really rare.  The II, I don't recall, and the III was all
solid state.  There was also an older pack set made by GE which had TPL
innards, usually referred to as a Progress Line portable, and which also
came with different innards not of TPL origin. Those had hybrid transmitters
and were all metal with a light gray top panel.  After the Voice Commander
was the GE Pocket Mate, an odd looking thing with a round speaker screen and
a telescopic antenna.  Found on the Watergate burglars at the time, I often
wondered if use of that radio was one reason they were caught.

The Voice Commander had an awful front end which made it unusable in urban
areas, in my experience.  The metal handle if bumped would contact the
telescopic antenna, and if you were transmitting, blow the PA in the
transmitter strip.  The transmitter was prone to oscillation and I
experienced RF feedback out of the receiver audio amp when in transmit.  It
was ugly and required two hands to hold it up while you spoke into it
(unless you had the remote mike.)  It was the poster child of the Gregory
Electronics catalogs for years in the late 1960's but at the time I didn't
have the money to buy one, in retrospect that was just as well.

For some reason there were a few years when several manufacturers thought it
was a cool idea to put the power supply in the control head.  Comco did it
for years and the squeal of the transistor power supply would drive you
nuts.  DuMont also had at least one mobile made that way.  Raytheon seems to
have pioneered the idea in the early 1950's with a vibrator supply built
into the head along with the speaker.

The RCA mobile with the quick-heating filament feed going up the mike
hang-up box cable was the Super Carfone. Later there was a Super Carfone 500
which looked almost the same but had a solid state exciter and a
conventional PA tube, and was free of that problem.  Over the years the
small tubular electrolytic capacitors would dry out in the Super Carfone and
eventually I would wind up replacing every one of them.

On the TPL, nobody has mentioned yet that the transistors were plugged into
sockets. I never used mine mobile, but a friend who was a tech for a large
shop in Chicago told me stories of TPL's coming in for service and his
finding a handful of transistors rolling around loose inside the housing.

This is a pretty obscure one but back about 1950 there was a police
motorcycle radio made by a company called Avia.  The reliability was
measured in days.  The California Highway Patrol bought an entire fleet of
them in 1951 and lost quite a few techs in the process, the morale in the
shops went to rock bottom. The tubes flew out of their sockets and smashed,
and none of the alignments held. They got rid of them at a loss after only a
few years.

Aerotron had a vacuum tube radio which had a transmitter plate tank coil
made of too-small wire.  Extended transmissions would cause it to heat up
enough to melt the solder holding it in, and it would fall out as a result,
and be found lying in the bottom of the cabinet.

I'll probably incite a lynch mob by saying this, but frankly, the first
Motorola HT-220's were pretty awful.  The ones with the speaker as the mike
element.  The components were crammed in as tightly as possible, in layers,
and they were murder to work on.  The foil would pop off the board without
warning and the receiver audio output was wimpy.  The later ones were better
but I really hated working on HT-220's.  You would replace the back cover
and another fault would pop up.  The HT-200 seemed more reliable except for
the audio output transistor pair, a couple of Germanium types which gave the
name "three legged fuse" to early transistors.  Those had the strength of a
parakeet.  Both the HT-220 and 200 suffered from oxidized battery contact
fingers in the housing, and getting them to stay clean is a nuisance.

Geoff
WB6NVH