Motorola Motrac Base Station

The Motorola MOTRAC Base Station was one of the most widely used base stations of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. This unit was a “tube” unit, before the age of transistors, and weighed around 30 pounds. It was very popular with all public service agencies due to its reliability.

My very first job out of high school was dispatching for the Kershaw County (SC) Sheriff’s Department. Their base looked a lot like this one with the same microphone as pictured. These cabinets were often customized for the needs of the agency using them. The one at KCSD was not an actual radio, but a control head for the radio which was located about ten miles North of Camden at one time and later moved to the water tank behind the Court House. Our unit like this one had the volume but no squelch control. In the topmost grey panel was an electromechanical digital clock. There were two spring-loaded switches along the bottom panels. One was a “reset” button for the 2250 Hz tone burst decoder (which was mounted on the back of the control head) and a “monitor” button which allowed monitoring of the channel if the reset button had been hit. All cars had a 2250 Hz 1/2 second tone burst encoder on them, which tripped the decoder on the base unit when they keyed their microphones. Ours did not have the green light but the red Motorola “M” would light up when the desk microphone was keyed. Thank You for posting this pic of this grand old radio or control head. They really do not make them like this anymore, sad to say. Wish I could get one operational set up for 2 meter or 440 MHz ham use for nostalgia’s sake. – Ray (2012)

Submitted to NEMSM May 2011 by Fred Swihart, additional information by Ray