Motorola Portables

General information on programing (mostly), reparing (not so much) and using Motorola portable radios.

Programing

Most older Motorola portable radios are programed with a ugly piece of software called RSS, or Radio Service Software. RSS is MS-DOS based and with a few notable exceptions, only runs on anchient Intel 286, 386 or 486 based machines and their clones. Each model radio has a different version of RSS specifically for that model. It's VERY important to realize how unforgiving RSS is to any errors or incongruities. A small break in a RIB connector cord or a momentary power loss can brick a radio permenatly.

DON'TS:

Use a "DOS window" in an older version of Microsoft Windows. Like 95 or 98SE.
Use any machine newer than a 486.
Use any programing cables that you think even MIGHT be damaged.
Dump/Flash the codeplug excessivley. If you only need to do it once, only do it once. Flashing codeplugs is black magic, and they corrupt rather easily.

DO'S:

Use true MS-DOS or a custom bootdisk with MS-DOS or DOS based Windows (Free-DOS works in some cases.
Make sure that the radio's battery is fully charged and won't lose power during the programing. (Attaching the radio to a charger is good idea.)
Make sure that the PC is hooked up to a good UPC or use a laptop with a good batery and connect it to a PSU.
MAKE A BACKUP OF THE ORIGINAL CODEPLUG. (This is SO important. If you "brick" your radio, it might be recoverable. You just need that original codeplug.)
Plan out EXACTLY what you want to program ahead of time. So you aren't stuck figuring out what you want while the radio is connected.

Even though the RSS software itself is rather a pain in the rear to get up and running correctly, it's rather intuitive and you can figure it out easily. I'm not going to go into the details of how on this site but there are YouTube videos on exactly this topic.
RSS is rather picky. The program times itself (and the serial communication) by the processor speed. Even an old Pentium II or I shouldn't be able to program a radio correctlly. (The progam ends up sending data to the radio faster than the serial connection can handle the data, and corrupts the codeplug.) But the VISAR RSS (HT1000, JT1000 and Visar) has been demonstrated to work on a bootdisk configuration on a Pentium 4. There are alot of variables, and I DO NOT recomend trying this, but the VISAR RSS is much less picky about what computers it will run correctly on. If you want to try this, here was my setup: HP Compaq desktop computer with a COM port, RIBless programing cable from eBay, and a VISAR RSS version 03.02.01 bootdisk running MS-DOS 6.22. Please read see my disclaimer page if you choose to continue with this.

DOSBox

Some people have reported success programing MAXTRAC and JEDI series radios on much newer hardware and operating systems using DOSBox and either a native COM port or a FTDI USB to serial converter cable. (This is very version dependant and will only work with DOSBox v0.65 which can be downloaded here) By default, DOSBox disables emulated COM ports, to enable the COM port in DOSBox, you need to edit the 'dosbox.conf' file with the folowing text (look around the end of the config file for the serial settings)

serial1=directserial realport:COM1 ocbus
serial2=directserial realport:COM2 ocbus
serial3=disabled
serial4=disabled

This will set the emulated COM1 and COM2 ports in DOSBox as the physical COM 1 and 2 ports. (If you are using a USB to serial converter you may need to change the assigned COM port to the device in Device Manager)
Hopefully this should work perfectly, to get around the emulated processor speed problems use the CTRL-F11 to slow it down.

Motorola JEDI RSS screenshot runing in DOSBox v0.65

"Lab" or "Depot" RSS.

Aside from the "normal" RSS that you and everyone else uses, there are also versions of RSS for each radio that are for Motorola internal use and have an elevated featureset and can hex edit the codeplug. These versions are good for making a comprehensive codeplug backup as it backs up more information than "normal" RSS does. Other things you can change include the customer ID, codeplug versiom, serial and model numbers.