Does anybody here use any type Motorola radios for listening to the trains while railfanning? If so what type do you use? I am looking at getting a Motorola MT1000 with a speaker mic for my trackside and a Motorola Spectra A5 for my mobile in my truck. The transmitting will be disabled in both thourgh the programing. Both will also come of Ebay.
I use a GE MPA as a handheld, that or the GE PCS are both outstanding radios. I have a GE mobile in the truck, and a Motorola mobile in the car, and the GE outperforms the Motorola hand down.
I use a D45-series Motorola MaxTrak for receiving ATCS MCP signals. It has been highly modified to convert it from a tranceiver to a receive-only radio. The receiver front-end filters have been removed and replaced with shunts to allow reception outside of the factory-designed range. A custom firmware EEPROM replaced the stock one to trick the radio to operate out-of-band. The discriminator has been tapped directly, feeding the raw audio directly into an external Griffin iMic USB sound processor without further processing inside the radio. The stock Mini-UHF antenna connector has been replaced with a lower loss "N" style connector after milling the heat sink to fit. The transmitter board has been totally removed, and replaced with a custom receiver preamp from Advanced Receiver Research. Since the internal front-end filters were removed, an external Telewave cavity filter is used to block all but the desired frequency. The radio is programmed with all standard ATCS channels, but performs best on the NS channel for which the external filter is tuned.
I'll second that on the GE PCS radio. I have one of those and have been very pleased with it. I also own a Yaesu FT-2800 mobile that I'm trying to figure out how to mount in my truck (if anyone has any suggestions on how to mount that in a 2005 Mazda Tribute/Ford Escape, please share the wealth). The Yaesu is an outstanding radio and you can probably acquire one of those new for a price comparable to a used Motorola Spectra A5.