Harris XL-200P Full Spectrum Radio

[kb4cvn]

That's great! Too bad your unity portables don't do EDACS.

The Unity Portable and Mobile both can operate on EDACS, and Motorola's SmartZone / SecureZone. The firmware to support these other formats was successfully developed and tested early on in the Unity's product development phase. The reason they were not implemented and offered for sale was the expected migration from users from older APCO Project-16 trunking systems (EDACS, LTR, Motorola's formats) to Project-25 trunking.

A strictly Product Management decision, not a technology decision.

... and to to motivate(!) customers to migrate to newer equipment.


BTW:
The only reason that the Unity mobile is finally marketed with EDACS is because of the great wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of the Public Safety Sector customers to Harris' Product Management staff.

 

[ElroyJetson]

It does make sense to support legacy systems that are still in use. Sales are sales. The radios are upgradable and if you sell a truckload of upgradable radios to a customer that will be needing system replacement before too long, you can show them that they've already made a pretty sizable financial investment in radios that WILL work on their new system, IF they pick the right vendor to provide that system.

Selling lots of upgradable radios to a customer makes it more likely that that customer will buy your system when it comes time for new system, IF those radios will work oin the new system.

It's just good business sense to sell them an upgrade path.

It's extremely likely that if Harris were to, over a period of a couple of years, provide virtually a complete fleet of P25 capable replacement radios for ageing older radios on a still running EDACS system, that when the time comes for a new system to be bid out, the investment already made in the upgradable radios will not be wasted and the whole system scrapped to change vendors. It'd be hard to justify scrapping that much to the taxpayers that are footing the bill.

 

[KE4ZNR]

As I said in another thread the local Harris rep dropped by with his 200 recently.
I was pleasantly surprised with the build quality....he did mention a new version of RPM (RPM 2?) was needed to program it.

He is getting me one to test on our Moto 7.13 system....though by the time I get it we might have upgraded the core of our system to 7.14 (after the Holidays).

I look forward to putting it head to head against my APX 7000 and 7000XE.

Marshall KE4ZNR

 

[ElroyJetson]

I'm going to bet that you will find the APX to be a superior radio. The XG will be impressive, but the APX will beat it by a significant margin in several aspects.

Just my opinion.

 

[DisasterGuy]

I have benched the APX7000 and XL200 and found them to be comperable in all respects except audio where the XL200 takes it. I haven't had a chance to put the APX8000 on the bench for a true apples to apples comparison.

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[KE4ZNR]

I'm going to bet that you will find the APX to be a superior radio. The XG will be impressive, but the APX will beat it by a significant margin in several aspects.

Just my opinion.

My biggest problem is that Harris does not have an answer when you bring up the fact there is NO WAY to convert my hundreds of existing Motorola XTS/XTL/APX codeplugs to Harris format. I would have to recreate every codeplug I have from Motorola->Harris and I don't get paid enough for all that effort
Marshall KE4ZNR

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[DisasterGuy]

Nor does Motorola have a way to convert a Harris personality. At least with Harris personalities are portable via any synthesized radio going back to the PCS, MDX, 300p, etc.

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[ElroyJetson]

Several years ago I was at an IWCE trade show in Las Vegas, and I spoke to several representatives of the various P25 vendors and expressed my concerns regarding the total lack of "codeplug interoperability" between brands. While any given radio vendor MIGHT be able to make a radio work on a specific P25 compliant system, every time a new radio type is added, somebody has to write equivalent codeplugs for it. I suggested that the participating companies might give consideration to writing their radio software to be able to import and export standardized formatted data files so that a given codeplug could be quickly and automatically generated for a different brand and type of radio.

Clearly this wasn't ever given any consideration. Nobody's doing it. But I think it's a great idea still.

My experiences with APX radios in the past were extremely favorable. Audio quality in particular was better than I had ever heard before, by a wide margin, even exceeding the previous high water mark, which to me is the audio quality of an analog Motorola Saber. Which sounds superb. If the XG200 sounds better than THAT, then Harris did quite a a job on it.

 

[KE4ZNR]

Nor does Motorola have a way to convert a Harris personality. At least with Harris personalities are portable via any synthesized radio going back to the PCS, MDX, 300p, etc.

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Hey, that is where I give Harris credit: "One software to rule them all"
It was a blast using RPM and being able to easily convert stuff from our loaner XG-75 to the loaner Unity and back.
The big downside to me as a programmer is that the only System key that was entered into my trial version was my system (5C9). So when I went to copy the VHF/UHF mission plan in my loaner Unity to a Friend's Unity RPM said "NOPE" because he somewhere had a system key in his that I did not have and I could not even view his programming in RPM nor change it in any way. My Harris rep confirmed this was due to how tightly RPM protects programming info.
At least in Moto CPS I can view programming info (without being able to change it).
But I will say Moto needs to learn from Harris one software package with local/global freq/TG sets.
Marshall KE4ZNR

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[NavyBOFH]

Several years ago I was at an IWCE trade show in Las Vegas, and I spoke to several representatives of the various P25 vendors and expressed my concerns regarding the total lack of "codeplug interoperability" between brands. While any given radio vendor MIGHT be able to make a radio work on a specific P25 compliant system, every time a new radio type is added, somebody has to write equivalent codeplugs for it. I suggested that the participating companies might give consideration to writing their radio software to be able to import and export standardized formatted data files so that a given codeplug could be quickly and automatically generated for a different brand and type of radio.

Clearly this wasn't ever given any consideration. Nobody's doing it. But I think it's a great idea still.

My experiences with APX radios in the past were extremely favorable. Audio quality in particular was better than I had ever heard before, by a wide margin, even exceeding the previous high water mark, which to me is the audio quality of an analog Motorola Saber. Which sounds superb. If the XG200 sounds better than THAT, then Harris did quite a a job on it.

Why would they? From a purely business perspective it's a losing investment for everyone to be together and develop 1) a standard export format and 2) the software to import it and convert it correctly.

You've essentially generated a forced brand loyalty as seen because all the Moto techs can't and won't take the time to convert codeplugs to another brand. So when it comes time to buy new radios, they'll kick and scream for Motorola. Easy sales then.

Now from the public safety standpoint, APCO should have built that into the P25 standard and be done with the inter-brand sniveling.


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[DisasterGuy]

The problem is that there are so many variables in programming from manufacturer. Even with Harris if I load a personality from day a p7100 into an XG75P I am likely to have to make adjustments to options to take advantage of any "new" features.

With that said, as was already pointed out, if I already have global sets I can build a new Harris personality in under 10 minutes.

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[ElroyJetson]

It really doesn't take all that long to develop a new codeplug from scratch if you know the system data. A few hours at most. A few hours testing the initial radios to be programmed with it to catch the bugs, too.

But, since all the manufacturers are constantly revising their programming software ANYWAY, and almost all of it has some means to output data to a printer or file OTHER than a radio codeplug, it seems to me that it shouldn't be all that difficult for the software development team to implement a standardized format for file sharing between brands. This would unquestionably be useful for those agencies that have fleets comprising radios from multiple vendors.

 

[DisasterGuy]

To be honest it is the main reason we stick to supporting single vendor environments in the shop. We use Motorola CM200 and PM1500 exclusively for analog conventional and Harris exclusively for P25 Trunking. Keeping yourself agile in multivendor programming environments isn't all that easy.

If we had a tenant agency that really wanted to use Motorola or Kenwood on our system they would need to have a support shop under contract to do their programming and maintenance.

When I need a Motorola programmed for smart zone compatibility I take it to a neighbor county that is a moto shop and when they need a unity programmed they bring it to me. While each of us can program both vendors radios it is simpler (as a rule) not to.

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[ElroyJetson]

Agreed, and you also have to respect system planning. While in my last gig as a radio tech, I had the ABILITY to program or reprogram any EDACS radio for the county system, and we did have a contract with a system user to maintain their radios, we had no actual authority to change any IDs or talkgroup assignments for any radio that our customer was using on the county system. My boss didn't quite fully understand where those boundaries were but to me it was as obvious as the sun in the sky. Fortunately I was never asked to do anything regarding the programming of any of those radios with the exception of swapping two talkgroup assignments in a talkgroup list for ONE M7100 console so as to ensure that the programming at the remote consoles made more sense to the users. But change IDs? Add or delete talkgroups? We had not been granted any authority to do that by the system administrators, thus we left that strictly alone.

In the process of performing that particular evolution I mentioned, I discovered that there was a previously undiscovered and potentially serious "issue" regarding the programming of the EMS radios and consoles in EVERY hospital in the whole county, except for one. I brought this issue to the attention of my boss and he did nothing about it. That problem still exists and I may be the only one who is aware of it.

The Select 5 tone remote board in an Orion/M7100 console doesn't use standard EIA signalling tones beyond channel 2. Oh, the tones are standard, but the channel assignments do NOT run 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. They run 1, 2, and then it's something like 7, 9, 11. Which is a problem if the desktop consoles are programmed assuming that the order is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It makes the third talkgroup and every one beyond it inaccessible from the console.

I offered to fix it but never got to do it. So the problem is still there. Some day something major will happen, communications WON'T, there will be an investigation, and that screwup that has been there for at least 15 years will come to light and somebody's going to get reamed for it. But it won't be me!

 

[sbk1982]

MTS2000DES, something that was said to us yesterday was that battery life is markedly improved in this radio. I presume that's compared to the XG100P - what's real-world battery life been like?

I have been testing one of these 200P's for the past few months. I never cared for the 100P's but I've used them with the lithium poly batteries. Their size was ridiculous and I found the keypad to be finicky and cause a lot of frustration when attempting to navigate the radio. The battery life for the 200P seems to be about 10 hours of steady use. I'd like to see a little better results with that in the interest of police departments that run 12 hour shifts. Not sure how that will work out but that's where things seem to be right now.

We program our Harris radios with Enhanced CC Scan settings for each county system. Because of this the radio is only capable of monitoring 1 trunked radio system at a time although it will scan conventionally at the same time within that configuration. I intend to test this soon with other system settings to see how the radio reacts to scanning multiple trunked systems at the same time. Something that seems seemless on the APX7000 I also have at my disposal.

I have the radio built out utilizing zones. The radio maxes out at 50 zones. That might seem like a lot to an end user but as a radio tech that was pretty easy to reach with different configurations I can set the radio to for troubleshooting system issues on top of programming it for field use as a first responder.

 

[DisasterGuy]

One the Orion/7100 enclosures you setup SG functions to map the tones to assign System/Groups.

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[ElroyJetson]

One the Orion/7100 enclosures you setup SG functions to map the tones to assign System/Groups.

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Yes, I'm aware of that. However, the mapping of the programmed talkgroup to a specific tone for the tone remote system is done on the 5 tone board which MAY be programmable but NOT via RPM or ProGrammer, and I was never asked to investigate the possibility of reprogramming that board.

(I just looked up the manual and the 5 tone board's tone selections are hard coded.) They are:
SF1 1950 Hz EIA for channel 1
SF2 1850 Hz EIA for channel 2
SF3 1350 Hz EIA for channel 7
SF4 1250 Hz EIA for channel 8
SF5 1050 Hz EIA for channel 10

The issue at hand is that the customer is using Telex C1212 consoles which control four or five separate radios via tone remote. One limitation of the C1212 is that while you can edit the tone to be used to control a given selected channel, this edit is global and is the same across all six channel circuits.

You simply can NOT program this kind of console so that it sends tones 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 to the radio plugged into line 1, and have it send tones 1, 2, 7,8, and 10 to the radio plugged into line 2. All lines have to use the same tone arrangement.

The other half of the puzzle is that the Telex consoles run an Orion (consolette) on line 1, another on line 2, and lines 3, 4, and 5 are all connected to Motorola UHF radios. Which are all programmed for anywhere from 1 to 5 channels per radio and they all have to work as per the county's radio plan documents.

Those Motorola radios are programmed with their operating channels as channels 1 thru 5 in regular consecutive order.

The problem crops up if you attempt to access the third, fourth, or fifth channel in the UHF radios.
The Telex consoles are not able to send the correct set of tones to the UHF radios (tones 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) if they are programmed to correctly access the 5 talkgroups in the Orion consoles, since the tone board in the Orion consoles is programmed for tones 1, 2, 7, 8, and 10.

There's a fundamental incompatibility here. Either the Telex console is programmed to operate the Orions properly, OR it's programmed to operate the UHF Motorolas properly. It can't do both.

Not unless the 5 tone board in the Orion consoles can be reprogrammed to utilize the industry standard EIA tones for the first 5 channels. Which I don't even know if it's possible.

Alternatively, the UHF radios could be programmed up with extra dummy channels with the correct channels being assigned to slots 1, 2, 7, 8, and 10. Which sounds easy but some of the radios in use are only basic 4 channel radios. So, swap radios. It gets annoying.

 

[DisasterGuy]

Gotcha. I wonder if perhaps the tones are some Zetron standard. I have never touched a Zetron console before but know that Zetron made all the remote boards for those desktops.

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[ConwayAR72034]

Harris XL-200P Full SPectrum Radio

We just signed a contract with Harris for a new Phase II 10 channel P25 800mhz system which includes 157 - XL-200P radios. We have been a Motorola user for 30 years no questions, this time we decided to publish an RFP. After it was all said an done Harris was our choice. The Harris presentation and demonstration was fantastic, Harris's entire system including the XL-200P radios blew Motorola out of the water. Looking forward to being the first phase II P25 Harris system in the state.

 

[ElroyJetson]

It has become quite obvious, since Harris Corporation bought out the M/A-Com-GE legacy brands and got the customer base, Harris is truly NOT playing around. They've applied substantial engineering resources from a company that is first and foremost a prime US government contractor for military applications and technologies.

I've said many times, competition improves the breed. While I still favor Motorola, Motorola seriously has to step up its game and do it quick, because the game is different now. Back in the "old days", it was generally accepted that Motorola got 80 percent of the public safety business, GE got 10 percent, and the foolish or poorly funded departments got other brands.

Today I would not be at all surprised to see that among contract awards in the last three years, Harris is probably winning WAY more than 10 percent of them. 30? 50? 60? I don't know. But they're gaining market share. Of that I'm certain.

And the breed is improving.

Motorola MUST step up its game and fight back or lose even more market share. Will they? If they want to remain relevant, they have no choice. I look forward to seeing HOW they respond.


This is all good.