SABER
This is the page for the Motorola SABER hand held radios.
Sabers are acient HT's from the late 1980's. In these they supported a CVSD digital audio known as SECURENET. Couple this with encryption using DES/DVP/FACINATOR (Saville) and it was a revolutionary secure radio.
Programing of these is a bear, as the software was rather poorly coded and must run on an old 386 or slower DOS PC. CPU cache should be disabled. I use a Toshiba T1920 booting from a flash drive.
The SABER uses all custom repackaged IC's. The 68HC11 CPU is mask programed and uses no external storage for codeplug data in the basic radio. There is no way to flash upgrade these, the CPU must be changed.
The SABER has three EEPROM's for storing operational data:
- CORE - Control of Radio Electronics - Main CPU on the main board 68HC11 has internal EEPROM, likely 512 bytes
- COPE Internal - Control of Peripheral Electronics - The HC11 CPU on the display board, this is the internal EEPROM, likely 512 bytes
- COPE External - Control of Peripheral Electronics - The HC11 CPU on the display board, this is the External EEPROM, 2k or 8k bytes
Contents
Types
Sabers come in 3 basic models
Type I - basic 12 channel saber, no display. In this radio the codeplug is stored on the CORE HC11 cpu's internal EEPROM.
Type II - front display, and 48 or 120 channels. These have 3 buttons on them and slave the external display (2k or 8k) EEPROM to the main radio. This means the data is programed in the internal EEPROM of the CORE CPU and then channel data is loaded in the 2 or 8k COPE EEPROM (and internal COPE EEPROM)
Type III - Front display, 120 channels, full DTMF keypad. These have the three menu buttons and then 12 DTMF digits. These have the same arrangement of CORE/COPE EEPROM, but are always 8k COPE external COPE EEPROM
There is a Type Ie which is a non-SECURENET model I that has the selector switch on it and is able to select between two zones. These use a front shield with a HC11 cpu as COPE external EEPROM to store the additional zone of channel data.
Notes
The latest RSS is R07.01.00 and what's nice about it is it's basically lab RSS. It will let you make a codeplug for any radio and write it to your radio. This can brick the radio, so you should be careful.
Manuals
Manuals for the SABER generally have been hard to come by. A ham lent me his manuals and I was able to scan the following manuals which are the only full electronic copies of them that I am aware of. The existing manuals I've found for download are from the FCC website and lack the diagrams and layouts.
External Links
Great article on the SABER at the Crypto Museum
http://www.batlabs.com/saber.html
http://www.repeater-builder.com/motorola/saber/saber-info.html
