Program a Motorola Radius GM300 with Windows using DOSBox

I scored a few older Motorola GM300 radios off of eBay and thought I got a great deal. This soon changed when I realized the programming options for this old radio were pretty limited. The first two things I ran across was the “Radius GM300 Radio Doctor” over at http://www.g0hwc.com/motorola_gm300_gp300.html and the original Motorola Radio Service Software (RSS).
The GM300 Radio Doctor piece of software did a good job at being able to program this ancient radio with a “modern” OS like Windows XP. While it may be good at programming in frequencies and changing around the channel numbers, that is about all I was able to do with it. I really needed to be able to program the pins for the accessory port on the back of the unit, more specifically I need the COS pin to be enabled (see below).

GM300 Accessory Plug
Pin 8 is shown as “programmable” and unfortunately wasn’t enabled by default for me. So I opted to take some time to get the original Motorola RSS software running on my Windows XP laptop. To get started, you will need the following:

A machine running Windows XP (Haven’t tried this on Windows 7 yet)
Motorola GM300 Radio
Programming cable for the GM300. Mine is simply an RJ45 connector to a DB9 (serial) connector. I picked mine up off of eBay for pretty cheap. (~$8)
GM300 Programming cable
USB to Serial adapter. I use an old Keyspan USA-19HS that I’ve had for many years. Looks like you can still pick these up for cheap on eBay. I’m sure another adapter would work, but this is what I used.
Keyspan USA19HS
DOSBox software. This can be found here: http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1. I used version 0.74 at the time of this article.
Original Motorola GM300 RSS Software. This can be found here: http://arpa.org/radio/software/motorola/rss/gm300v.5.zip

Setup:

First thing you want to do is to connect the USB to serial adapter up and plug it in to your computer.
Go to the Control Panel and then the device manager.
Make note of what COM port was assigned to your adapter under “Ports” (COM1 in my case).
Right click on this and go to Properties.
Now click on the Port Settings tab and set the baud rate to 2400, and make sure the other values match below:
Now, Install DOSBox and let it install into its default directory.
Browse to “C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.74″ (or other based on version installed).
Double click “DOSBox 0.74 Options” and it should open dosbox-0.74.conf in your default text editor.
Scroll all the way to the bottom for the [serial] section.
Change “serial1″ to match your COM port and also disable the others. Should look similar to the following:
Open and extract the GM300V5 zip file to your root drive C:\. This just makes it quicker to mount in DOSBox for me.
Fire up DOSBox and mount this extracted folder with “mount d c:\gm300dos” command. This will mount this directory as the D drive within DOSBox.
Browse to the D drive and fire up GM300.exe file. Can just use the commands “d:” and then “GM300.EXE”.
You should now be presented with the following with no errors:
Press F9 to get into the SETUP menu
Press F3 now to get to the PC Configuration. Below is how I configured my directory and set my COM port. Since our config file had “serial1″ set to our COM port, our port setting here is “COM 1″. If I set “serial2″ to point to COM1 in the config file, the setting here would be “COM 2″ and so forth.
With these settings, perform a “COMM TEST” by pushing F3. You will notice the results in the upper right hand of the window. When I first attempted this, I was getting either “#2 – No Acknowledge” or “#7 – Invalid Opcode” and then “Radio Communications OK” would come up. I thought all might be OK and tried to proceed. It wasn’t working though and thought I might have hit a wall.
After much trial and error I believe I came up with a solution that has been working fine for me since. What you want to do is to hold down “Ctrl” and press F11 until you read “Cpu speed: 191 cycles” in the top window bar of DOSBox. What this will do is essentially emulate slower hardware on your machine.
So, Press “Ctrl F11″ until you see “Cpu speed: 191 cycles”
Turn the GM300 radio off and then back on
Press F3 for the “COMM TEST” again
This time you should only see “Radio Communications OK” message come up. If so, you are now good to go.
Go back to the Main Menu by pressing F10 and press F3 to go to the “GET/SAVE Codeplug Data”
Press F2 to “READ CODEPLUG”
You should now see data being read from your radio. Things are going well if you get this far.
After a successful read, you should see your radio model number show up in the upper left:
From here, you will want to go to back to the Main Menu and then to “CHANGE/VIEW Codeplug Data”
Since I wanted to enable the pin on the back of the radio I wanted to go into “RADIO WIDE Configuration: Scan, Accessory Connector”
Press F9 for “OTHER ACCESSORY”. This section will let you change the function of the programmable pins on the back of the radio:
Changed Pin 8 to “CSQ Detect”. This pin is active when both PL/DPL and a Carrier are detected by the radio.
Press F10 to exit this menu, and then F10 once more to get back to the CHANGE/VIEW Codeplug Menu.
Press F5 to get into the “MODE Configuration” menu. This is the menu that will be used to program frequencies in for the various channels on the radio.
Pressing F4 will take you to the next channel which is designated by “Mode”.
Once all of your frequencies are programmed in, press F10 to exit this menu.
Press F10 once more to return to the main menu.
Press F3 to get to “GET/SAVE Codeplug data”
Now press F8 to Program all of these settings and frequencies into your radio.
Press F2 to confirm.
You should now see a progress bar similar to when you read the codeplug data.
Now press F10 to exit the Motorola software and type “exit” to quit DOSBox.

You should now have a fully programmed Motorola GM300 Radius radio! There are many more settings within this software such as adjusting power for each channel. I didn’t get around to playing with these settings since I don’t have a meter to measure the radio’s output power. These settings are in the “Service” menu and should probably be adjusted with care. There is a possibility that you can throw your radio out of calibration, so don’t say you haven’t been warned :). Below is what the power adjustment looks like for those curious: Please feel free to leave any comments or problems that you encountered. I haven’t tried this on Windows 7 yet, but suspect that things will work just fine with the above settings. Hope this info helped someone out there with one of these old dinosaurs like it did for me! 73 de KF5RRX.

Useful Files:RadioDoctor Files
GM300 Service Manual
GM300 Instruction Manual
motorola_gm300_schematics
motorola_gm300_schematics.pdf
http://www.repeater-builder.com/motorola/maxtrac/maxtrac-index.html
http://www.repeater-builder.com/motorola/maxtrac/gm300-info.html
gm300 windows program gm300 with dosbox

https://digitalhamradio.groups.io/g/main

VE3WZW Andr.
twitter.com/ve3wzw
instagram.com/va3wzw

Now, Install DOSBox and let it install into its default directory.
Browse to “C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.74″ (or other based on version installed).
Double click “DOSBox 0.74 Options” and it should open dosbox-0.74.conf in your default text editor.
Scroll all the way to the bottom for the [serial] section.
Change “serial1″ to match your COM port and also disable the others. Should look similar to the following:
Open and extract the GM300V5 zip file to your root drive C:\. This just makes it quicker to mount in DOSBox for me.
Fire up DOSBox and mount this extracted folder with “mount d c:\gm300dos” command. This will mount this directory as the D drive within DOSBox.
Browse to the D drive and fire up GM300.exe file. Can just use the commands “d:” and then “GM300.EXE”.
You should now be presented with the following with no errors:
Press F9 to get into the SETUP menu
Press F3 now to get to the PC Configuration. Below is how I configured my directory and set my COM port. Since our config file had “serial1″ set to our COM port, our port setting here is “COM 1″. If I set “serial2″ to point to COM1 in the config file, the setting here would be “COM 2″ and so forth.
With these settings, perform a “COMM TEST” by pushing F3. You will notice the results in the upper right hand of the window. When I first attempted this, I was getting either “#2 – No Acknowledge” or “#7 – Invalid Opcode” and then “Radio Communications OK” would come up. I thought all might be OK and tried to proceed. It wasn’t working though and thought I might have hit a wall.
After much trial and error I believe I came up with a solution that has been working fine for me since. What you want to do is to hold down “Ctrl” and press F11 until you read “Cpu speed: 191 cycles” in the top window bar of DOSBox. What this will do is essentially emulate slower hardware on your machine.
So, Press “Ctrl F11″ until you see “Cpu speed: 191 cycles”
Turn the GM300 radio off and then back on
Press F3 for the “COMM TEST” again
This time you should only see “Radio Communications OK” message come up. If so, you are now good to go.
Go back to the Main Menu by pressing F10 and press F3 to go to the “GET/SAVE Codeplug Data”
Press F2 to “READ CODEPLUG”
You should now see data being read from your radio. Things are going well if you get this far.
After a successful read, you should see your radio model number show up in the upper left:
From here, you will want to go to back to the Main Menu and then to “CHANGE/VIEW Codeplug Data”
Since I wanted to enable the pin on the back of the radio I wanted to go into “RADIO WIDE Configuration: Scan, Accessory Connector”
Press F9 for “OTHER ACCESSORY”. This section will let you change the function of the programmable pins on the back of the radio:
Changed Pin 8 to “CSQ Detect”. This pin is active when both PL/DPL and a Carrier are detected by the radio.
Press F10 to exit this menu, and then F10 once more to get back to the CHANGE/VIEW Codeplug Menu.
Press F5 to get into the “MODE Configuration” menu. This is the menu that will be used to program frequencies in for the various channels on the radio.
Pressing F4 will take you to the next channel which is designated by “Mode”.
Once all of your frequencies are programmed in, press F10 to exit this menu.
Press F10 once more to return to the main menu.
Press F3 to get to “GET/SAVE Codeplug data”
Now press F8 to Program all of these settings and frequencies into your radio.
Press F2 to confirm.
You should now see a progress bar similar to when you read the codeplug data.
Now press F10 to exit the Motorola software and type “exit” to quit DOSBox.

Motorola Amateur Ham Radio

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Motorola Radius GM300 with Windows using DOSBox

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