Hi guys- long time lingerer and first time poster.
im on the hook to technically evaluate this radio for my employer before a large purchasr- and I thought I would drop my 2 pennies after my findings today.
#1 - Harris doesn’t have a operator or maintenance manual for this device on pspc, you can find the white papers and sales material, but I haven’t found the manual for the radio. Anywhere.
#2 - RPM-2 doesn’t seem to have the oddities of this new model radio worked out in the programming software. For example, on the 200/185/150 there is a 2 way switch behind the volume knob that can be used to enable/disable encryption, or in our case lock/unlock the radio.You can program the keypad to lock the radio, but there is no option in the radio to unlock. Also, the 95 has 3 buttons on the side, a ptt and two option buttons, I could not program these, forcing me to make one of the 3 option buttons the button to select what zone/system you’re in. There’s a few more small things I found in RPM2 that didn’t line up with the radio - you could tell that there wasn’t a whole lot of testing before fielding.
with RPM-2 use caution on going to the bleeding edge firmware revision as the software release notes identify that upgrading rpm2 to current will make it incompatible with radios x version or below.
#3 audio playback - one of the cornerstones of features for the 200, does not work correctly. The radio I was using would only play the first call the radio received. I did validate that you could navigate to the menus/calls/playback and the newer calls were being recorded - but with no way to put this in the front end, the feature is useless.
#4 noise canceling - Harris has this down, and I validated with music so loud I couldn’t hear myself talking, the call was clear, you couldn’t even hear the music in the background.
Conclusion - When the bugs are ironed out, this has the potential to be my favorite Harris radio. The size of the xg-75 and the feature rich capability of the xl-200 make this radio a potential gem, but the evidence of a rushed deployment have me pulling on the reigns. When a few versions of firmware are deployed to iron out the turbulence, this radio will hum. As I write this, I have had no success updating firmware on any radio by any other process other than 1 radio at a time, 15 minutes per unit. Take this process and multiply it by the amount of releases it’s going to take Harris to get it right and you have a lot of repeat work.