Just a word of warning - one of my Chinese suppliers tells me a large number of old Motorola radios are now available. It seems they are EP300 series, in the no button, some buttons and lots of button versions. When they were discontinued a large quantity were unsold, but the plant who made the radios did not make the batteries, and these ran out years back. A source for brand new batteries has appeared and the old stock is now being sold at quite decent prices to Chinese suppliers. They sent me a couple ‘to try’. I had an old one laying around and pulling them apart, I cannot see any differences at all. They seem to be genuine, and with the new batteries, they’re good. BUT - you get a brand new radio and need a Windows XP computer to program them. No 64 bit software available. I’ve noticed these appearing for sale, but be wary - the frequencies inside are all over the place, and no way to program them unless you have an ancient PC hanging around. There are lots of stock, but all models are the same vintage - so be wary.
If they are really, really old models, there is one more thing to be aware of if you use business or commercial grade radios in the US. Since January 2013, all business radios manufactured, sold and used in the US must be 12.5kHz narrowband compliant. Some older Motorola radios are, but many radios manufactured in the early 2000s are not.
This article explains the FCC narrowbanding mandate. We also discussed it at length in an old episode of The Two Way Radio Show podcast.
Thanks Rick, same here in the UK, but these ones are OK for our business radio market and are proper 12.5KHz ones, but on ridiculous frequencies - close to our business band but not, so I bet they correspond to US radio allocations.
If you need an older computer OS, try using a virtual machine on something like VMWare. You load various OS systems on a modern computer.
I tried that but it couldnt seem to access the programming cables, so I gave up. P