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Birth of the GE MASTR II Commentary by Kevin K. Custer W3KKC Compiled by Robert W. Meister WA1MIK

This is a collection of in-house GE photos from the era when their engineers were tearing apart MICOR mobiles to come up with the MASTR II. Like Motorola, GE employed the finest technical staff and engineers of the time, such as John Main, Al Giesselman, and Tom McKee. Many of these folks are licensed Amateur Radio operators too!

The photos below are from General Electric's Mobile Radio History site.
Thanks to K4ZAD for making them available.

The first photo shows the concept of the compartmentalized layout. The caption refers to a comment on the back of the photo, which says, "Looks like the one on the table". For those that don't know, that's a Motorola Motrac LHT mobile radio, probably UHF, which had a solid-state receiver and exciter and a tube driver and PA inside the black finned heat sink at the right/rear.

This photo shows the four engineers looking closely at a MICOR, probably Motorola's best fully solid-state two-way radio. From the removed metal cover, I can tell it's a VHF model. You see MICOR spelled out on the chalkboard. And, you see the reference to the black parasitic suppressor across the RF final transistors as a schematic drawn on the chalkboard. Al Giesselman has the PA RF cover in his hand.

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This page created on Tuesday 02-Apr-2019.

Article text © Copyright 2019 by Kevin K. Custer W3KKC.
Artistic layout and conversion to repeater-builder format © Copyright 2019 by Robert Meister WA1MIK.
The photos and their captions are the intellectual property of Thomas A. McKee K4ZAD.
His photo site can be seen here: MASTR II Development - 1970 thru 1972

This web page, this web site, the information presented in and on its pages and in these modifications and conversions is © Copyrighted 1995 and (date of last update) by Kevin Custer W3KKC and multiple originating authors. All Rights Reserved, including that of paper and web publication elsewhere.