The PCradio was released in late 1991. Designed primarily for mobile workers such as service technicians, salespersons, public safety workers and possibly the military. The PCradio featured a ruggedized build with no internal hard disk drive and was optioned with either a cellular modem, an ARDIS RF modem or a simple built-in analogue modem via a built-in standard landline modem. It's mono display works in CGA mode with 80 column by 25 text. Storage was on SRAM instead of a hard disk drive. There was a landline and a cellular model and the cellular one could apparently have an attachable handset.
I've obtained two of these machines - one in UK/British specification and another in Italian. Both of them had the same symptom-faulty-screen and neither of them had it's original power supply.
Here is the original sales brochure for the PCradio:
Here is an original newspaper article talking about the new technology.
Here are a group of pictures of my Italian PCradio:
As you can see there is a big, fat connector on the back which was either never used, or connected to a 'breakout box' listed in the accessories section.
When you power the machine up, it will boot using a BIOS by 'Vadem, Inc':
The display is a green transflexive type with part number 64F5638 and the model number KL6420PSHC-FW.
Inside the PCradio
The base of thepcradio is relatively easy to open. It's striking how unique this machine is - I would say besides the chassis, keyboard and display, there is little which stands out as IBM's own. Once you've removed a dozen-or-so screws from around the base, here is what you see:
And here are some close-ups of the keyboard:
Here is the base, with it's NovAtel cellular modem sitting slap, bang in the middle of the unit. It's interesting that this UK version of the pcRadio has an 0831 telephone number for this specific analogue mobile:
And as a slight segue, here is the antenna which is contained within the lid that connects to the cellular mobile:
Back to inside the base, we have two small daughterboards - one has the CMOS battery attached, which I replaced:
Then we have this small power-related board which has one 47u through-hole capacitor on it:
Power Supply Pinout
I built my own power supply, using a Bambu H2D 3D printer and some connectors I had in a spare parts drawer. The first job was to estabish the pinout for the unique 4-pin, male power connector:
I 3D printed the female barrel connector. The STL file for it is here:
Fixing The Display
Both my machines had the same fault on the display - which showed the whole left-side covered in horizontal bars. At first I thought there was a deterioration in the connectors for the display but thought I'd try recapping and so glad that I did. Here is what we started with:
Upon close inspection, I could tell the machine was definitely working because you could make out the odd half-character and the display would change based on keyboard commands. Also I was able to use the printer to PRINTSCREEN!
To remove the lid, there are two flat-headed ''beads' at the top of the LCD bezel to remove and some philips screws underneath. Then there are a few rubber bumpers to remove around the bezel and finally behind the printer cover are two more Philips screws. 8 in total. The lid has a sticky 'gasket' around the outide. Loosens easily if the machine is warm but also just stick a spudger behind where the hinges are and it will prize apart.
Once the back of the lid was removed, there was a small PCB along the side of the LCD which had 4 very degraded surface-mounted capacitors. 3 had leaked very slowly and left a white crust underneath each one and the other had leaked in a very wet way, leaving a wet, brown sludge underneath. Luckily a sympathetic removal, cleaning and reapplication of a couple of Polymer capacitors and a couple of ceramic capacitors (both solid and will never leak) managed to recover this board back into working condition. Below is the 4-step process in 1) OEM, 2) Caps removed, 3) Cleaned and re-tinned and 4) Caps replaced:
And voila! The LCD came back to life!
Storage
The machine will support IC memory boards of which there are two types - SRAM and Flash. This machine only has one bay, so it's only worth using for flash. The machine is PCMCIA/JEIDA compatible. On the built-in DOS 4.0 ROM you'll find a program called ICUTILS.COM which has a nice interface and makes it easy to format a flash card. I was trying to find the PC-TASK Manager / Fixed Disk Application Manager shown on the promotional brochure but it looks like it never was officially available. There is some blurred out text in the picture so I suspect it was made specifically for one corporate customer. I found what I think is an older version here - the IBM Personal Computer Fixed Disk Organizer.