GE / Ericsson M-RK

I picked up a Ericsson M-RK radio from Facebook. It came with a (dead) battery and charger. It has the 440 to 470 MHz bandsplit, so it is usable on part of the 70cm band. I picked up a new battery and programming cable and the radio works great!!

I also ended up picking up four in the 800MHz bandsplit from eBay as I didn't read the listing very clearly... They weren't too expensive and now I have a bunch I can experiment on without being sad if I break them. I later picked up another 440-470MHz as well as a battery eliminator so the radio can be powered from a bench power supply.

After a few months of searching, some inexpensive VHF band split radios showed up on eBay! I quickly picked up two for some testing. They are the 150-174MHz split, but the same .sc4 file hack that works with the GE Orion radios, work with the M-RK, with no additional changes needed. The radios also came with support for AEGIS digital voice!

These radios are interesting as they have been manufactured under at least 4 companies; GE, Ericsson, M/A-COM, and Harris. GE initially made them, then their radio division was sold multiple times, but the radio kept being made. My radios all say Ericsson on them, but I have a M/A-COM charger and a Harris speaker/mic.

One issue with these radios is that it uses a proprietary antenna connector. One of my radios did not come with an antenna and they are fairly expensive. I setout to create a solutiuon to allow me to use a standard connector with the radio, hopefully SMA or BNC. You can find all the details here

A cool feature of this radio is it supports EDACS, an early trunking system. This system supports analog voice, as well as three different digital voice modes, VoiceGuard, AEGIS, and ProVoice. VoiceGuard was the earliest, then AEGIS, and finally ProVoice. Unfortunately the UHF radio I have only supports VoiceGuard, which only supports encrypted voice.