PMR Radio Finds | Tait 3000, Philips PRP73 & Philips PRP76

I received another four radios yesterday in the post. All eBay bargains at less than £30 for the lot. There was two Tait 3000 PMR handheld transceivers, one Philips PRP73 VHF/UHF handheld and one Philips PRP76 VHF/UHF handheld. Some really nice handhelds from the 1990's some keepers for my collection so I'll quickly go through them. 

Philips PRP73 & PRP76:

These radios were sold by a collector on eBay and came programmed to PMR and Simple UK frequencies by the seller. They are good solid radios in great condition. The only problem is they came without a charger but fully charged. I'm bidding on a charger on eBay at the moment which I'll likely win. If not, the seller has offered to source me a charger from a friend of his.

The two radios are both VHF/UHF and were released around 1992 and marketed by Philips as "advanced portable transceivers designed for use in handheld and bodyworn applications". They feature CTCSS, DTMF and Selcall signalling, channel scanning and voting, dual watch and password protection. They run 1w on low power and 4w on high power.

They are powered by attached 7.2v Ni-Cd rechargeable battery packs which are in full working order and hold charge without issue. Audio is clean and clear and I have yet to do a range test on them. 

All in all a great buy and even better when I manage to get a charger.

Tait 3000:

These radios cost me about £5 as part of a big job lot which I'll show at a later date. The whole job lot that I purchased was sold on eBay as parts and not working but 10 out of 11 radios worked perfectly. They just needed charging.

The T3000 was developed by Tait Communications, New Zealand in 1996. A typical competitor of the Motorola Saber Series, they were popular with the authorities in New-Zealand but also with many law enforcement agencies worldwide. In the Netherlands the T3000 was used by the police for observations and by the Mobiele Eenheid (Riot Police).

The radio offers limited security by providing a simple voice scrambling technique known as frequency domain scrambling (inversion) which was often mistakenly identified as 'crypto'. 
The radio can be programmed with a variety of Trunking settings, Conventional (analogue) channels and optional functions, by means of the special programming software. As the radios are several years old now, the programming software is no longer available from the manufactuer (Tait), but appears to be present on the internet. 

My radios are flat and came with no charger but were last electrically tested around 2007 so I'm holding up hope for these. I've ordered a charger pretty cheap to test them out. They are in great quality with no cracks and the battery contacts are pristine. When my charger comes I'll test them out and if they're no good I've not lost much and I'll sell them on.

Thanks for reading!

73's, Lewis M3HHY.
Manchester, UK.