ICOM IC-F11

I have a pair of ICOM IC-F11 handheld radios. These are commercial grade 16 channel LMR radios.

I got them used from Bartronics via eBay. They arrived pre-programmed per my specs. They were originally purchased for a volunteer fire department in 2002 and traded in. They work fine and are in good shape. They came with worn out NiCad batteries (as expected) and I immediately ordered new LiIon batteries and a charger from Batteries America. Now they are better than new - lighter and longer standby time. They also came with speaker mics.

"Commercial grade" means I was able to set them up for MURS, you can't usually do that with a ham radio. They are not as flexible as a ham radio in that there is no LCD display and you can't change frequencies from the front panel. You have to choose from 16 presets.

Programming

I had Bartronics program them to operate as MURS band on the first 5 channels. After using them a few months I bought a copy of the programming software ($15) and set them up with 2m and NOAA stations.

MURS band requires no license to operate, so we can use the pair of radios for any field work. They are handy when I am pulling wires or up on a roof. MURS band channels are set to 2W TX power.

I have set up 7 channels for operation on the 2m ham band, with 2 simplex channels and 5 local repeaters. 2m channels are set to 5W TX power.

The remaining 4 channels are set receive-only for NOAA weather broadcasts.

Personal notes

The CS-11 programming software is installed on the Atmel Parallels machine on Plover. It's licensed and there is a copy of the license code in the password database.

I installed it on the new desktop Murre too, but it fails there too. It's a bad day for radios for me.

I am trying to connect the radio to Bellman which has an honest-to-god serial port on it.

screen -U /dev/ttyS0

I can see weird unreadable characters, either it's binary or the serial port settings are wrong.