Jeff Liebermann wrote:
DTC hath wroth:
Gosh...I miss my 70 watt Micors and darn near crystal clear audio on IMTS
systems with 30 mile range. But that was thirty years ago.

Who said they were gone? Fire up your scanner or service monitor on
the old IMTS frequencies and you'll hear the idle tones or sometimes
idle chatter.

As far as I know, all the Southwestern Bell mobiles were given to local
Motorola Sales and Service (MSS) shops. I never paid attention to the
defunct MTS/IMTS channels, but all the RCC channels went over to paging.

Brings back fond memories of the "RCC wars" (radio common carrier).

In Texas, they were all pretty cooperative with reciprocal roaming. Rates
in the '70s were typically $40 a month which included mobile radio rental
and unlimited minutes and free roaming. Denton Texas with the two
universities had like 300 users in the early/mid '70s. When the rates
jumped from $20 to $50 per month (on *TWO* VHF channels), it dropped to
like fifteen users.

However, you're right. I really miss my Motorola T1234 mobile
telephone and giant Secode control head. It really impressed the
various ladyfriends in college.

The Secode was indeed much easier to program than the Motorola control
head. I used the Secode head on my RCC radio and the Moto on my SWBell
radio. In line with the Jackie Gleason and Michael Todd story of one-up-
man-ship, I had both control heads mounted next to my 4WD shifter on my
trucks. My local RCC would not mute the repeater when dialing 2805, so when
my mobile answered the code, it ack'ed with a burst of 2805...which
canceled out the four second 2805 ringing tail and my horn would only beep,
so I had to disable that feature.

To get access to a busy channel in Dallas, I'd drop into manual mode and
listen to the channels for a conversation about to end, then let go of the
chrome hookswitch arm and slam the roam button and the appropriate channel
button - forcing it to roam in IMTS mode to the only free channel. Of
course I would never whistle off the connect tone of an incoming call meant
for another user and grab the channel when it went back to idle.

I eventually upgraded to the all solid state Motos and smaller control heads.