The Motorola Saber
portable radio is a product series of
Motorola USA, Inc. The Saber is a commercial radio that was developed for the
U.S. military sometime around 1989.
The Saber is widely recognizable by thin, sleek design compared to other radios at the time. Despite the fact that the Saber was originally marketed to the military, many
law enforcement
Law enforcement is the activity of some members of government who act in an organized manner to enforce the law by discovering, deterring, rehabilitating, or punishing people who violate the rules
Rule or ruling may refer to:
Education ...
agencies and
fire departments realized the benefits of the Saber and Motorola soon had a much larger customer base for the radio than they expected.
Saber Conventional
The first Saber line was Conventional operation only. The conventional Sabers were capable of PL/DPL and were
encryption
In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can de ...
capable. The Saber came in 4 different flavors; I, II, III, and IE. The Model I has 12 channels in 1 zone, and no display or
keypad
A keypad is a block or pad of buttons set with an arrangement of digits, symbols, or alphabetical letters. Pads mostly containing numbers and used with computers are numeric keypads. Keypads are found on devices which require mainly numeric in ...
. The IE was a Model I with an additional zone of 12 channels, 24 in all. The Model II is either capable of 4 or 10 zones, for a total of 48 or 120 channels. This is dependent on the memory. It has a
backlight
A backlight is a form of illumination used in liquid crystal displays (LCDs). As LCDs do not produce light by themselves—unlike, for example, cathode ray tube (CRT), plasma (PDP) or OLED displays—they need illumination ( ambient light or a ...
display which was capable of 5
alphanumeric
Alphanumericals or alphanumeric characters are a combination of alphabetical and numerical characters. More specifically, they are the collection of Latin letters and Arabic digits. An alphanumeric code is an identifier made of alphanumeric c ...
characters if you have the 120 channel 2 KB version or the basic zone/channel display for the 48 channel version. It came with 3
softkey
SoftKey International (originally SoftKey Software Products, Inc.) was a software company founded by Kevin O'Leary in 1986 in Toronto, Ontario. It was known as The Learning Company from 1995 to 1999 after acquiring The Learning Company and ...
s to access menu options. The Model III was basically a Model II with a full DTMF keypad.
Systems Saber
The Systems Saber added analog
trunking
In telecommunications, trunking is a technology for providing network access to multiple clients simultaneously by sharing a set of circuits, carriers, channels, or frequencies, instead of providing individual circuits or channels for each cli ...
operation, direct access to functions via the keypad (on the Systems Saber III), and increased
channel capacity to a then-unheard of 255 conventional channels. The Systems Saber also increased the number of channels per zone to sixteen and added the ability to reprogram the function of many of the controls.
ASTRO™ Digital Saber
The Astro Saber was introduced in the mid 1990s and was a technologically advanced and state of the art at the time. The Astro Saber is feature packed Not only is it capable of IMBE Digital and conventional analog on a per channel basis, but also some models are 12.5/25 kHz per channel as well. This makes some Astro Saber Narrow Band compliant.
Model I has 16 channels, in 1 zone. No display or keypad. Model II has 16 channels in 16 zones and a 14 character alphanumeric backlight display. It came with 6 softkey buttons to access an advanced menu. Model III was basically a model II with a full DTMF keypad.
See also
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References
{{reflist
Models of radios