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Motorola Quantar Enhanced Wildcard Features Without Leaving In The Enhanced Board Contributed to Repeater-Builder by Josh Heide K6ZRX

This procedure will trick your station into thinking it has an enhanced wildcard board instead of a basic board. It does require you to have access to an enhanced board, or a codeplug from a station with an enhanced board. You also cannot access hardware that is not present on the basic board, such as more of the I/O lines, or wirelines 3 and 4. I discovered this trying to make stations for simulcast. I needed to run PL into the station from GPS based encoders, to allow stand-alone operations with a different PL, and also wildcard tables to control a relay for E/M to the voter.

If you have just a codeplug from an enhanced station, you should just be able to configure it to your type of station and band. Program the station. When it resets the WL Fail and WL On lights will flicker for several minutes. This is the controller programming the wireline board.

If you have an enhanced board, turn off the station and install the enhanced board. Power up and read the station with RSS. Select "8-wire Wireline" and "Enhanced Wildcard". Program the station and let it reset. It may or may not do as above and program the wireline card. Once it resets and settles down, turn off the station and replace the enhanced board with the basic board. Power up and it will do the flicker light thing and then be ready to go.

I have this working on several Quantars, old and new. Work was done with RSS 14.02.01 with all codeplugs being updated to that RSS version. The enhanced boards are around $4500 each, so this is a real $$$ saver. Just remember to not try to access hardware that is not present on the basic board. Only use opto-isolators, relays, and open collectors that are present on the basic board, and of course there is no second pair of wirelines.

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This page originally posted on Tuesday 07-Oct-2008.

Article text © Copyright 2008 by Josh Heide K6ZRX.

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.