On Sun, 16 Jan 2011 20:37:44 EST, Bill Horne
wrote:

I was just wondering: whatever happened to GE's "Progress Line" and
Motorola's competing commercial sets from the 70's? They were
crystal-controlled, transistorized or hybrid units that put out
something like 70 watts.


IIRC under the manufacturers' trade-in policies in those days, those
rigs were subject to spin-off to the ham community - I had both Motrac
and MICOR heavyweights over the years.

One railroad radio ham source told us that under the "narrowbanding"
upgrade program, Motorola has withdrawn from the railroad radio market
-probably because it wasn't big enough, leaving it to Kenwood and
ICOM. On his railroad, Motorola radios used for trade-ins had to be
destroyed, and he related seeing a railcar full of "out of service"
Motorola radios enroute to the scrappers. This may have been a
condition imposed by the new suppliers.

Apropos of that -- those of us who started in ham radio in the 50s
remember lots of military "war surplus" radios that we could use on
the ham bands. Where are the retired radios from the Vietnam and
later eras now? Not on "surplus" sources available to us, for sure.