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[N2MIR]

I have aquired a Motorola radius cm300 Commercial radio made for 2 meters. At the moment it’s programmed for police and county radio frequencies. I have been told you need an old widows machine that has 98 in it. XP is suppose to work but I purchased a USB to serial port adapter so it will possibly work to program the radio. I downloaded a Program called dosbox. Also bought the programming cable for the radio. A fellow ham on utube had a modified version of the original radio software that I downloaded. I know little about Dos. First I need to know how to place the radio software into dosbox. Has anyone ever programmed one of these Motorola radius units?

[K5LXP]

I still have and use some older moto radios, namely sabers, HT1000's, maxtracs and MCX1000's.  I can't recall what vintage the CM300 is, if it's the older 8 bit software you might be out of luck.  The first generation RSS ran on 8 bit machines and relied on the hardware clock for I/O timing.  Run it on anything but an "XT" or "AT" machine and while the software would work, it couldn't read or write the radio.  DOS software eventually became compatible with faster machines (e.g. 386/486) but some was never updated (I think HT600 fits into that category).  Point of all this is running the software from a "DOS box" should be pretty straightforward, it's the radio I/O and port mapping that you'll have to work through.  My answer?  A 35 year old Toshiba  286 that boots from floppy drive.  If that ever craps out I'll be in trouble.  My approach would be to mess around with a DOS terminal program which offers user control of COM ports.  Once you figure out the magic settings of DOS box to allow that to work then that's what you'd try with the RSS (hardware timing notwithstanding).

Mark K5LXP
Albuquerque, NM

[K7MEM]

If you are going to run DOSBox, you can probably run it on almost any MS machine. I ran DOSBox on XP and W7, and I still use DOSBox for some old DOS based software on my W10 and W11 systems.

I had a little trouble initially, but I did a lot of DOS work in the day. Now I just keep a text file with all the instructions handy. My example below is for HamCalc.

• Install the DOS software in a directory off of the c: drive. For example, I installed HamCalc in "c:/hamcalc_129". That directory contained the startup file for HamCalc, which was named "ve3erp.bat".
• Start DOSBox.
• In the DOSBox window, mount the directory with "mount c: /hamcalc_129", followed by a return. Note: that is a space between "c:" and "/hamcalc_129".
• Again, in the DOSBOX window, change to the HamCalc directory with "c:", followed by a return.
• Run the program. For me that would be "ve3erp", which a batch file that starts everything. I can also just run "gwbasic" for extracting the Basic programs from HamCalc or for working with other programs.

I also have a program for RX/TX of Morse Code that is written in C and runs in DOSBox. It runs on a Windows 3.1 system and on Windows 11. I mention it because it communicates with the I/O interface using a serial port.

I haven't programmed one of those Motorola units, so from here, your on your own.

[G4AON]

I did manage to change the squelch setting on an old Motorola mobile with DOSbox under Windows 10, but it was hit and miss, certainly not reliable enough to program frequencies.

The best bet is to ask around for an old DOS computer.

73 Dave

[N2MIR]

Correction, it’s a GM300 not CM. Thanks for all the comments and help