Alright, so you have all the stuff you need (About $500-600 worth of stuff at this point) for the repeater and you need to program things. First, are you going to do a crossband repeater or a single band “unidirectional” repeater, as Motorola calls it. We’ll start off with a unidirectional repeater setup. I’m going to use GMRS 462.550MHz and 467.550MHz here as the example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Open the R.I.C.K. up. There are two screws that are Torx in the back. Pull the board out. Look for jumper J6. It’s a three pin jumper. This is if you want the repeater to start out in setup mode or not. I have no clue why I would want it to power up in Setup mode but if you want that put the jumper on pins 1 and 2. If you don’t, put the jumper on pins 2 and 3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then go to the DIP switch. Here are the settings for the vanilla unidirectional repeater:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Close the R.I.C.K. back up. You’re done inside it. I’m assuming you have the cables for the R.I.C.K., and mine has an accessory plug with a couple jumpers in it. No idea what the jumpers do but they are there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now you’re going to power up a Radius M1225 radio and put the programming cable in the RJ45 mic plug. If I had a crystal ball, I would say you’re about 45 minutes from looking for a baseball bat to smash the radio and your computer with. Here comes the pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The M1225 doesn’t like to talk to the PC unless the PC is super slow. It also doesn’t seem to like ANY USB to serial adapter except a FTDI one. And the adapter cable? Many seller mislabel them. I recommend getting one from Bluemax49er. Yes there is no Prime shipping, yes it’s a little pricy, but you won’t have to deal with returning it, or frying your radio. You’re supposed to be using a DOS computer and a Motorola RIB cable. The RIB cable, the real one, sells for around $300 used, so that’s a bummer. And a DOS PC? If you’re into playing with DOS PC’s you’re a big enough nerd to not need this guide, methinks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, there are various ways to get the programming done but I’m only going to speak on the way that I did it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here are the settings for the RX radio:<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the TX radio it is slightly different:<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s it. This example uses Channel 1 on a 4 channel radio. YMMV. If you want four different repeater pairs repeat the steps for the other three channels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Send the programming to the radio. It will beep when done. Power off the radios and then hook the RX radio to the RX plug on the R.I.C.K.. Do the same for the TX radio. Turn everything on. Plug the radios into the Duplex that you tuned (There are lots of How To’s on tuning duplexer so look that up and do it before hooking everything together). Hook the antenna up. You should have a functioning repeater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is no accommodation for the repeater ID’ing though, so the next thing you’ll have to do is splice in an ID-o-matic or something. But guess what, if you get an ID-o-matic board you won’t need the R.I.C.K., so maybe just do that instead, because the R.I.C.K. is pretty useless if you want to stay legal. Maybe just get a real repeater, that would be the play here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations, it took me multiple weekends to get to the point everything was working, and (no bragging intended) I’m an industrial controls and automation engineer. I will say, if I had to do this a second time it would be a breeze, but getting there the first time, it was hellish and did not feel fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Oh, here is the crossband R.I.C.K. dip switch settings, which Motorola calls “Bidriectional”:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The full RICK manual is here: https:\/\/www.repeater-builder.com\/motorola\/manuals\/rick-manual.pdf<\/a> So now you have a working Radius M1225 RICK repeater with a duplexer. I don’t know why though, I told you at the beginning to rethink it, but here we are. You could have gotten a Kenwood TKR-850-1 repeater for around the same price, or two Kenwood TK-8180’s and made a duplex cable. Both are easier to program and have better reception and sensitivity. Serious, what were you thinking? Oh well, que sera sera. Have fun with it at least, I know I didn’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Got two Motorola Radius M1225 radios and a R.I.C.K. repeater controller and want to make a repeater? First off, there is no ID, so it’s not legal for amateur or GMRS use. Second, seriously rethink it. There are tons of other ways to go about this. You’re about to go down a long, dark path, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,89,6],"tags":[97,96,93,90,91,94,95,92],"class_list":["post-989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hacking-radios","category-repeaters","category-technical-articles","tag-duplexer","tag-gmrs","tag-m1225","tag-motorola","tag-r-i-c-k","tag-radius","tag-repeater","tag-rick"],"blocksy_meta":[],"rttpg_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/2a6e75b3-c6f1-4065-b294-497644fef3c6.jpg",1024,1024,false],"landscape":["https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/2a6e75b3-c6f1-4065-b294-497644fef3c6.jpg",1024,1024,false],"portraits":["https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/2a6e75b3-c6f1-4065-b294-497644fef3c6.jpg",1024,1024,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/2a6e75b3-c6f1-4065-b294-497644fef3c6-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/2a6e75b3-c6f1-4065-b294-497644fef3c6-300x300.jpg",300,300,true],"large":["https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/2a6e75b3-c6f1-4065-b294-497644fef3c6.jpg",1024,1024,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/2a6e75b3-c6f1-4065-b294-497644fef3c6.jpg",1024,1024,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/2a6e75b3-c6f1-4065-b294-497644fef3c6.jpg",1024,1024,false]},"rttpg_author":{"display_name":"N8GMZ","author_link":"https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/?author=2"},"rttpg_comment":0,"rttpg_category":"Hacking Radios<\/a> Repeaters<\/a> Technical Articles<\/a>","rttpg_excerpt":"Got two Motorola Radius M1225 radios and a R.I.C.K. repeater controller and want to make a repeater? First off, there is no ID, so it’s not legal for amateur or GMRS use. Second, seriously rethink it. There are tons of other ways to go about this. You’re about to go down a long, dark path,…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=989"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":994,"href":"https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989\/revisions\/994"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.we8chz.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/image.png\")
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You’ll want a tall cup of coffee and a stress ball handy for this manual. <\/p>\n\n\n\n