Monday 12 February 2018

Using Raspberry Pi to program GM300, Maxtrac and others

Hello everyone,

I wanted to share with you a great way I found to reprogram older Motorola radios using a Raspberry Pi computer and a FTDI based USB to serial cable.  As most of you know the usual route to reprogramming these 1990's radios is to have a very slow computer with serial ports that runs DOS, which are getting harder to find as time goes by.

However the friends over at Hamvoip have integrated a Dosbox emulator inside their Raspberry Pi VoIP image that out of the box have all the necessary software to reprogram the following radios: Maxtrac, GM300, Maratrac, X9000.

A simple update of the Raspberry Pi image adds support for the following radios as well: GP300, HT1000, HT50, HT600, MT1000, P110, P200, QUANTAR, RADM100, Spectra.

The way it works it that the Raspberry Pi handles the DOS software and the physical interface with the radio and you use a modern computer to access the Raspberry Pi via an X11 session to do the actual programming. You could theoretically install the Raspberry Pi at the repeater site and reprogram the radios from the internet.

I am currently using it for reprogramming Maxtrac radios and all I needed was a FTDI USB to Serial cable and a motorola programming cable which I ordered here for $8 USD:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/RIB-Less-Programming-Program-Cable-for-Motorola-GM300-GM340-GM339-GM380/32436412551.html?

The startup documentation is here:
https://hamvoip.org/hamradio/motorola_programming/

Youtube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0ia0NbdoxU

Here is the setup I have running at home:



73s from Charles VE2FXO