Somehow I missed this thread. So no pictures of the actual radio? Must be a rare one because I couldn't even find pictures of it on a google image search.
I owned a Messenger 123A and a 123SJ. The SJ version had the LED as the S meter whereas the A had a regular meter. Other than that they were mostly identical on the inside. At one point I had a 4125 but the channel display was going out and was mangled from a previous owner.
One thing I hate most about these radios is how the microphone is wired right into the radio. Probably was a cost saving measure but my God those mics sound terrible. The 23 channel radios were easily converted to have a channel 24 by soldering a link in the channel selector where the missing bit was to lock out that channel.
Another thing that was a pain with those radios is that all the crystals were soldered right onto the channel selector and used some strange mix of IF frequencies if I remember right making it a pain to modify easily.
It may be radio abuse but all three of those radios were parted out for projects. Most of the resistors being so old were out of spec and would have took some real work to restore those radio to their former glory but I got mine out out of the trash anyways so couldn't expect too much.
The one thing I will give these radios is the antiquity. They look really cool on the inside and you can tell they were early designs built like a tank. Surprised they didn't use relays for the TX/RX lol.
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