Thursday, August 20, 2009

Ron Henselman Comments on Marti Units

Wow! The size of a Marti is much larger than I imagined. I was asked to work on a remote unit for the local NBC radio station in Chicago about ten years ago. They were using a Motorola Maxtrac radio which normally runs about 5 KHz of FM deviation. It was built into a small case along with a twelve volt automobile stereo. The deviation was set to way above what I thought was the normal limit for that mobile transceiver. When I questioned the engineer, he told me that was normal for the frequency they were allocated.

This package was taken aboard the traffic helicopters. The mobile traffic reporter would listen on the AM or FM band with the car stereo component, and he or she would know when to start the report. The whole package only weighed a few pounds. I'll bet things are even smaller now.

I couldn't get any help from my coworkers because they were too busy drooling over the sexy female traffic reporter who brought the unit into our service facility. I wonder how small the current units have become? Anyway, the reason the units sound so good is they are/were running a wider FM signal than we would normally use for a typical two-way FM radio such as in a police car. Since they are allowed more bandwidth, this means they can have a better high frequency audio reponse. Ron Henselman

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