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Vintage Amateur and Military Radio Amateur/military receivers and transmitters, morse, and any other related vintage comms equipment.

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Old 6th Mar 2017, 6:28 pm   #1
2eorcsscott
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Default Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

Hi all I've recently joined.
I had hold of this radio for a while and was duped into buying it, as was promised he would send out the programmed EPROM later.
However nothing come of this so I've got a doorstop unless someone can help me out.
I believe I need a 2764 EPROM programming to be able to use on the 70 MHz band.

If anyone can help it'd be greatly appreciated.
Scott
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Old 7th Mar 2017, 12:06 am   #2
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

I don't currently have info for programming these but it might be possible to dig something up given more info about the radio.

There should be a 'band letter' on the end of the model number, but by Philips convention it will be part of the model number marked on the rear of the set, rather than the generic model number on the front panel. For VHF low band it needs to be an FM914E - there may be one or two more letters in the model suffix as well.

Do you have reason to believe this is a VHF low band version? Does it have its former operating frequencies engraved on it somewhere, or is it still operational on its original frequencies?

There is a website dedicated to Four Metres - not very active these days unfortunately but an enquiry there may find you someone who has what you need.

www.70mhz.org
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Old 7th Mar 2017, 1:43 pm   #3
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

I used to use these sets when i was in the signals , its had its original channels check via a dummy load and freq counter.
Ive searched and searched and therse only a couple of websites ,the pye museum and ringbell. Ive even joined a yahoo group for the fm 900 and still no leads.
Thanks for replying every bit of info helps
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Old 7th Mar 2017, 2:52 pm   #4
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

If there's an EPROM in the set, operate it into a dummy load and frequency counter to determine the frequencies. Then if you can get someone to download the contents of the EPROM to a file you may be able to reverse engineer the code by comparing it with the frequencies.
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Old 7th Mar 2017, 7:32 pm   #5
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

In principle that's a good idea but the numbers in the eprom won't have any obvious relationship to the numeric frequencies so it will be difficult to know which bytes / nibbles in the eprom correspond to part of - or all of - any particular RX or TX frequency.

You could certainly try the brute force approach of working out all the current RX and TX frequencies on the radio and then changing just one bit in one byte to see if that changes one of the TX or RX frequencies. This would be more easily done using an eprom emulator or an EEPROM equivalent of the original EPROM. I have actually successfully done that kind of thing before, but it was beyond tedious.

To complicate matters, if the radio has some kind of intelligent front panel which uses a microprocessor then the eprom may not hold the channel information at all, but instead may only hold the program code which runs the front panel functions. In this case the channel frequency information may be held in a different device, like a serial NVRAM. That is especially likely to be the case if the radio can be reprogrammed using an external programmer of some sort.

Edit: Service manual here, if I have correctly identified the set. 5th item down, ignore the 'Download' bait button at the top of the page. Quite a large file (50MB) with lots of images, so too big to post here.

http://www.vk3ukf.com/vk3ukf_files/H...iceManuals.htm

Last edited by SiriusHardware; 7th Mar 2017 at 7:53 pm. Reason: Diagram (hopefully) found.
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Old 11th Mar 2017, 11:11 am   #6
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

From what I know the radio is operating on the old British Army Mould network, I used one when I was in the Royal Signals back in the day. If iI could get it usable I'd be very happy as it was a fav of mine.

I know it needs a 2764 programmed for the 4m band.

For example out of its 250 channels it has various simplex and duplex channels:-

71 is 79.515 MHz
72 is 79.590 MHz

I would be over the moon if at least it had just 2 freqs I could use., 70.450 MHz and 70.475MHz.

Cheers, Scott.
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Old 11th Mar 2017, 11:55 am   #7
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

Have you tried asking on the VMARS site?
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Old 11th Mar 2017, 12:43 pm   #8
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

Scott, do you have any way to read the contents of the EPROM which is fitted in it at the moment? If you can do that and upload the code here, there are some pretty clever people around here who might be able to work out how the channel programming is encoded just from the frequency info you gave for channels 71/72.

Another route would be to find someone who already has one of these working on 4m and beg a copy of their EPROM.
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Old 11th Mar 2017, 1:11 pm   #9
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

This might help:-

https://hamfiles.co.uk/index.php?pag...phillips-fm900

You'll need to run it in DOS.

The unzipped .txt and .doc files look promising, but I haven't actually run the program. If it works you'll be able to produce a .bin or similar file which I'm sure someone will burn to an EPROM for you.
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Old 11th Mar 2017, 1:56 pm   #10
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

Hi All,
Well done to Siriushardware for finding the manual.
This is going to be a difficult one, I think. The rig is processor controlled and the PROM doesn't just contain the channel frequency information but also seems to contain the CPU program and various other data items. I could not find anywhere in the manual where any information was given about channel frequency programming, other than the statement that the set would be programmed before leaving the factory.
It would probably be possible - but tedious - to reverse engineer the values for N used in the divide-by-N stage of the synthesizer for a given RF channel frequency using the information given in the technical description and the datasheet for the divide-by-N IC in the synthesizer. Each channel frequency requires 7 4-bit words sent sequentially. However, I suspect you would then need to find a way of decoding the address bits sent from the processor to the PROM for each channel to know what memory addresses to use. And, of course, you would need to copy the program and program data for the CPU from the original PROM to your new one.
If somebody has already done all of this, I will be really impressed!
The FM914 is a very advanced radio and it would be a shame if they are useable for little other than doorstops. Given that they were designed and widely used in Australia, maybe that is where the best chance of finding more info lies
cheers
Peter G8BBZ
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Old 11th Mar 2017, 2:49 pm   #11
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

No sooner said than done!

While I was busy posting about how difficult I thought it was going to be to find programming software for the FM900, StationX was busy posting the answer!
Hopefully somebody will let us know if the software works.
cheers
Peter G8BBZ
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Old 11th Mar 2017, 7:48 pm   #12
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

I ran the software in DOSBox and it works fine, though it takes a bit of getting used to:-

http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1

Screenshot attached to whet your appetite.

So you need to create a job file then get someone with an EPROM Programmer to burn it to an EPROM for you.
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Old 11th Mar 2017, 8:47 pm   #13
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

Thankfully this simply generates a file which you then feed into a friendly EPROM programmer.

I've had bad experiences with 1980s "Soft-programmable" PMR radios [where you directly upload the channel-settings to the radio from a PC via a serial link] - lots of the programming-software for these used software-loops to provide delays between sending successive commands. They kinda assumed that you would be using a PC with a really-slow clock rate [anyone remember the old XTs with a "Turbo" button?] and trying to clock-down a 1990s/2000s laptop to run slow-enough not to overrun these radios was a real pain.

[My experience of field-support of MOULD gear was in the rockbound days; I was deskbound before the FM9xx appeared].
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Old 11th Mar 2017, 11:31 pm   #14
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

I used to have a heap of old 27C64/128/256's stashed somewhere and a Dataman S7. I'll try and dig them out.
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Old 12th Mar 2017, 1:39 am   #15
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

We had similar problems with Motorola PMR gear in the nineties when trying to program legacy MC Micro's with a "new" laptop. I seem to remember using a Dos program designed to reduce the speed of the PC called AT-Slow. In the workshop we used to have an old desktop machine for programming, but for field work using laptops we had no option but slow the whole thing down. It took us a while to twig what the problem was when it first happened. The later software was Windows based and didn't cause trouble.
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Old 13th Mar 2017, 2:03 am   #16
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

Nice find by Graham - the original programming software for Philips communications products of that era used to be very carefully guarded, dealer only and hard to come by.

After poking around a bit more I've found an 'ended' auction on a military vehicle forum for an FM914PM with advice to the effect that the seller can provide eproms programmed for four metres, the seller in question being Tetra Communications who I've often seen selling ex-PMR gear at various radio rallies, particularly Blackpool.

Googling around will find a telephone number for them in Northampton. (Although it's possible, I suppose, that they were the very source from which Scott acquired his example in the first place).
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Old 27th Mar 2017, 11:17 am   #17
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

Looks like we've been wasting our time. The OP hasn't visited the forums for more than two weeks.
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Old 27th Mar 2017, 6:35 pm   #18
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Default Re: Military Pye/Philips FM914PM. EPROM progamming.

He may just have solved his problem some other way - he's not obliged to inform us of his every move.

I always take the view that good information like the info collected in the foregoing posts will eventually prove useful to someone, even if the original seeker appears not to follow up. Threads in this forum always come very high up in the results of any relevant Google search -it is an amazingly good resource for all sorts of technical information.
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