Motorola PULSAR II

In approximately 1979, Motorola introduced the Pulsar II, their last IMTS platform. Interestingly, the Pulsar II radio is much larger than the Pulsar I, much heavier, and more cumbersome to service. The Pulsar II uses a unique heavy, cast one-piece housing which was not shared by any other Motorola product. Pulsar II's continued the design of plug-in cards for the circuitry, but they were not interchangeable with the cards of the Pulsar I. The Pulsar II cards use a different form of plastic connector, which may be more reliable than the open connector socket pins used on the Pulsar I cards. The Pulsar II introduced some unique new features such as VSP (Vehicular Speaker Phone) and MACS (Motorola Automatic Channel Sentry, see above.) The MACS board was also available as a retrofit option for earlier Pulsar I drawers, and in those sets was placed on top of the Trisolector casting (again, see photo above.) . The Pulsar II was first sold as a UHF version of the Pulsar I, intended to replace the MK mobile radio, and sold with either a UHF marked Pulsar I control head or an MK control head, and shortly thereafter was changed to use the Pulsar II style head shown below. Then, a VHF version was produced, and Pulsar I production dropped altogether. This led to the early confusion of calling the Pulsar II the "UHF radio telephone" and the Pulsar I the "Pulsar radio telephone." The housing is a solid, one-piece casting which lifts off by loosening the screw fasteners on the bottom side. Unlike the Pulsar I, the II was designed with the annoying feature of a mounting tray, adding weight, complexity and tears when the units are found on the used-equipment market without them. The Pulsar II style control heads were sold in either black or off-white (now typically a faded, dirty yellow.) The head is connected by a flat ribbon cable to a plastic "junction box" which in turn mates to the standard mobile cable and has connections for the speaker-amplifier and certain other accessories. The Pulsar II radio drawers used the same connector as the Pulsar I, but require a unique and proprietary connector on the cable end as the II series requires a deeper "snout" on the connector body than the Pulsar I series does. The "Off Hook" switch allows dialing and listening with the handset still hung on the cradle/base assembly. Note that there is considerable circuitry in both the handset and the base cradle. The Pulsar II heads have a rudimentary memory capability and can store roaming channel sets and numbers.