Batboard

Hello All,

I am a Motorola Certified Pager Care Technician. I worked for the Motorola Pager Care Center for over 15 years. I am fully versed in all of the Motorola paging lines accept for the Minitor 3, 4 and 5 line of pagers. I have as of this year been training myself with programming and the simple replacement of housings, control knobs, battery doors, clips etc....I have been learning quite a bit about programming these pagers from this site and other sites.

Today I came across an odd problem on a Minitor 5. I of course did a search of this site to find an answer, but none of the suggestions worked. Here's a review of the problem and what I have done so far.

The pager will not turn on. The battery is charged and powers up other pagers. The charger{version C} also charges other pagers and the battery will also charge in the separate slot for the battery only.

When I put this known good and charged battery in the pager that will not turn on into the known good charger, it turns on and everything works fine. I can even send test pages to the pager and it will alert, store messages etc. It will even go into programming mode.

When I take the pager out of the charger, it will not turn on. Of my decades as a pager repair technician, I have never seen anything like this.

I have carefully cleaned the contacts on the pager, programming pins, battery contacts on both the pager and the battery and also the charger.

I would think that it is some kind of contact problem, obviously not anything I have tried.

Is it time to sent it off for repair?

Is the Motorola owned Service Depot the best and or cheapest option?

Are there any Motorola Authorized Depots that actually service Minitor 5's, or do they send them to Motorola owned Service Depot?

I've read that the Motorola owned depot just swaps out the complete pager. I have no idea if this is true.

I am looking for suggestions on a possible fix, or suggestions on the best solution to send it for repair.

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions.

G

Sounds like you have an internal electronics(power switching) problem. The Motorola JSC(Juarez service center) is operated under contract, don't know whether M owns the service facility or not. $78.00 flat rate repair is likely the best way to go, since they don't seem to want to retest pagers after repair for gas tightness(and maintain the IS rating), so they replace the pager in most cases - after opening the one that you send in for repair to see if the failure is covered under the flat rate price. The Motorola paging distributors that maintain a service center charge about the same, but your pager will not have an IS rating when you get it back.

Thanks. I tried to find a web site for the Motorola JSC(Juarez service center) and found nothing on Google or yahoo. Can I get a web address? Thanks


































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Yep, flat-rate it to the depot and get a new pager. Easy.

JSC Motorola service center has no standalone website. It's accessible through MOL. http://businessonline.motorolasolutions.com. The dropdown menu under 'repair center' will offer the options to initiate service requests, check on the status of repairs, etc.

I have been hearing about problems with batteries on the 5's, and also what appears to be charger problems which have been more frequent in the units manufactured over the last 6-12 months. A friend of mine got a 'new' battery a few weeks back and after 2 days was only getting 3-4 hours out of it per charge. I know that of there isn't minimum voltage on the battery that it can effect programming (even if the unit will power up and even still alert). Don't know if this is it; just thought I'd mention it. Good luck!

The depot is no longer run by CTDI. Motorola brought it back in house earlier this year. As for the Minitor, almost smells like a bad battery, except it's a known good battery. No field repairable parts are available to the best of my knowledge so the only real option is a flat rate. Or you can send it to one of the cheap-o houses in the midwest that robs parts from other pagers and doesn't offer FM certification on their repairs?

Thanks everybody for their input/suggestions. To me it still seems like a battery or charger issue, but I have eliminated both possibilities. Thanks for the link Al. I will let Motorola deal with it.

G