Regency, Relm and Wilson Information Index

Regency and RELM
Technical Information and Modifications
Assembled by Mike Morris WA6ILQ

(anybody have logo files for Regency, RELM or Wilson ?)

Regency Electronics was an old-line electronics manufacturer from the 1950s and 1960s... I still have an early Regency pocket transistor radio, and a MR-series tube-type tunable VHF monitor tabletop receiver from about 1961 or 1962, both of which my dad brought home one evening... he was a commercial photographer then and was doing some work for an article on Christmas holiday electronics gifts for Popular Mechanics magazine. The Regency representative gave him two of the items after the photo shoot was finished. A number of years later I found a matching tunable low band receiver at a neignborhood garage sale. All three still work perfectly today. By the 1970s Regency had low-end land mobile equipment in their product lines, both VHF and UHF, plus some amateur VHF and UHF radios. The Civil Air Patrol had been using them, under the Regency brand name, for many years at that point. Later on Regency Electronics abandoned the consumer electronics market, and today the name is unknown - except as the first two words in Regency Electronics Land Mobile, better known as RELM. Regency's last product lines included programmable scanner receivers, including the "M" series which were the first synthesized scanners that covered the amateur 10 and 2 meters and 440mhz band without mods, and advertised as such. A programming trick appeared soon after in the Radio Communications Monitoring Association (RCMA) Bulletin on how to get out-of-range frequencies into it, like 52MHz amateur radio channels. Personally, I suspect that the original firmware programmer put it in for production line test purposes, then once the unit was in production someone dropped a note to the RCMA. In the late 70s Regency bought Wilson mainly for the Wilson-designed mini-handheld that was 1/4 the size of the existing Regency equivalent product, but left the Wilson HF & CB antenna line intact. Nowadays RELM is fully in the land mobile business, and has bought Uniden and the Bendix-King land mobile product line (BK kept the Avionics products). RELM did not abandon the BK or Uniden names, both still exist as if they were separate companies. But the Regency name is, unfortunately, forgotten except by a few.

Repeater-builder is looking for additional info on the Regency and RELM repeaters, bases, mobiles, etc.

Regency MCCU repeater manual 6.2mb PDF file, donated by Steve Bosshard NU5D

Programming the Relm MPV32 and MPU32 radios 3kb, donated by Arthur Bross KC7GF

Programming the Relm MPV32D radios 44kb, donated by A. Nonymous

Programming the Relm RH250, RH600 and RU150 radios 3kb, donated by Arthur Bross KC7GF

This is the complete, front cover to last page, manual for the Regency RH250 and RH256, and Wilson RH2516 as one 11 Mb PDF file donated by Jerry Coffman WB5RUA. He created it from the 11.5MB zip file containing 89 separate JPG files, one per page, donated by Brett Kitchens KF4SQB.

Programming the Relm RH606 radios 4kb, donated by Arthur Bross KC7GF

Programming the Wilson WHS150 16-channel handheld radio 3kb, donated by Arthur Bross KC7GF

Programming the Wilson RH250, RH256, and WH516 radios These are the sloping front land mobile radios that look like the Regency M-series scanners. RELM manual number 0300-40427-800 4.6mb

Regency "Touch" K-500 scanner owners manual 647 Kb This manual covers the 40 channel model, the K100 is the bare-bones 10-channel version.

Regency TMR-8HL scanner owners manual 301 Kb

Regency M-400 scanner owners manual 4.1 Mb This manual covers the "40" channel model, the M100 is the 10-channel version. And note that the radio only actually lets you enter 30 channels into the scan memory, and while the VHF search increment is 5khz the UHF one is 12.5Khz (i.e. it can't do either 6.25 or 20KHz spaced channels).

Regency ARU9PL / TRU-152A radio service manual. 2.7 MB PDF This is the 15w two channel crystal controlled mobile radio that was built into an M-series scanner case. It was manufactured either as a 450-482 or 482-512Mhz, and range changing is very difficult. It was shipped with either 465.5TX/460.5RX or 494.5/491.5 crystals pre-installed and pre-aligned, and used clip-on heaters on the crystals to maintain frequency stability. A PL board was optional. The design was fairly fluid, there were at least 7 revisions of the main board.

One trick with the Regency M100 and M400 scanners:
As shipped the advertised frequency ranges were 29.44-50.555, 143.36-174.075, and 439.3125-512.900 (where did they get those frequencies?). When you program a frequency outside those ranges into the scanner (for example 52(dot)525) it displays an error message. You can defeat the scanners frequency limits by entering an additional decimal point first, for example, (dot)52(dot)525. If the VCO will lock and the scanner will accept it just fine (if it doesn't it displays "Poor F.". The only side effect of this trick is that if you have an out-of-band frequency in the scan loop it pauses on that channel for a ridiculous amount of time as the VCO sweeps to and locks onto the frequency.

By prefixing the frequency with the decimal point the scanner I have will accept from 19.985 to 60.940, from 118.145 to 200.060 and from 301.750 to 711.300 MHz. Of course the PLL VCO won't phase lock across that wide a range, plus the front end isn't going to hear anything much outside the design range, but the numbers are somewhat interesting. My M400 actually hears decently from 29.30 to 52.60, from 135.500 - 186.500 and from 384.520 to 536. If you compare the numbers, the M400 will not receive too far outside of its normal range. But it does hear the local ARES 2m repeater, the local PD (on 154 and on 508), 29.600, 52.525 and a few GMRS channels, which is why I bought it.

As cheap as these M100 and M400 scanners are ($5 to $10 at garage sales or flea markets), it's worth picking one up just to listen to the local 10m or 6m repeater (after you tweak the front end a little) - even if the squelch pot operates backwards.

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The information presented in this web site, on these web pages and in these modifications and conversions is © Copyrighted 1995 - current by Kevin Custer W3KKC and multiple originating authors.