Kenwood P25 radios

[relliott]

Does anybody know or have experience with Kenwood and the new Public Safety P25 standards? Our department is in the process of converting to the 700/800 Mhz digital. We have been "forced" to buy Motorola handhelds, The cost of the Moto mobiles are way out of line, we are investigating other options.


All of our current mobile radios ane Kenwood TK-790's except one which is a Motorola., The handhelds are mixed Kenwood, Icom and a couple Motorola's. Motorola and Icom's have had problems. Needless to say we are very happy with the Kenwood's. We would like to hear the good and the bad of the P25 experiences before spending the extra to be like the rest and just accept the "forced" brand.

Thanks,
Rich

 

[W0JJK]

A local department used the 800 digital Kenwood on a digital P25 system, they took them all out of service. They were not happy with them compared to the Motorola. Junk was the word one of the user described them to me.

 

[ILMRadioMan]

You get the quality you pay for.

Motorola isnt out of line.
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That being said, 700/800 MHz digital is kind of vague.

Is it a 9600 baud system? Is it purely conventional?

 

[relliott]

700 Mhz digital trunk

My understanding is the mobiles will be 700 Mhz digital trunked system. The HT's are dual band 700 Mhz digital trunked & 800 Mhz analog for fireground ops.

At this time that is about all I know, we are going to be a test bed for the initial roll out of our counties system. Our area has virtually no competition in the equipment providers arena, it is a one player game.

 

[n7maq-1]

The new 700/800 units are the TK 5410 (portable), and TK 5910 (mobile). They have an AMBE vocoder and so far I have heard good things about them. If there is any "mixed mode" trunking with a 3600 BPS control channel, then you are going to have to use Motorola, or EFJ radios. If it's a P25 9600 BPS syatem then the Kenwoods should work fine, but you need to see what the system administrators say.

If they say only Motorola, you need to get a good reason why. If they don't have one then you need to contact the board who paid for the system and see why you are locked into Motorola.

Motorola...You can buy better, you just can't pay more.


Jim