My name is Ana,
I’ve recently been handed the responsibility of housing, distributing, tracking, and servicing our radios for our facilities. I have experience in troubleshooting electronics (mostly computers ) but I must admit I’ve never done radios before!
I’m looking for help on troubleshooting and servicing my radios, and am hoping to find it here among you all. I mostly deal with Motorola CP200, Motorola EVX-261,Icom F4001,and Icom F2100D .
Cheers
Do you intend to repair them? Programming radios with computers is commonplace but you tend to do it once the. Only when you add radios, or change facilities do you do it again. Servicing faulty radios is to be honest, a horrible job now as surface mounted devices rule and you need normal soldering skills plus air soldering and flux flooding pcbs. Worse , is the fact they’re RF devices so you need signal generators, tracking analysers and meters of all kinds to do even basic fault finding. I’ve got one on the bench at the moment in the workshop. No output. Well a teeny weeny output. I can probably fix it, but I need to buy a few tools to get to the guts. Not fun at all, and if it needs a standard part, probably a driver, I can source one easily, but if it’s a custom chip you cannot even guarantee being able to get one.
Will you also be responsible for antennas, feeders, repeaters and filters of all kinds? That’s a lot of skills to pick up?
We have a radio department (this is a government facility) So anything invasive to the unit physically and any programming will be done through them. But I’ll be handling troubleshooting, testing and storing. I used to do soldering on motherboards in my time with HP. But I won’t be utilizing that here. (thank goodness)
I must admit, I’m not a fan of the Icoms. The motorolas are much easier to diagnose when it comes to battery and charge issues.