I have a large fleet of UHF P7100's and a handful of them on VHF as well. We only purchased these after a lengthy evaluation process that compared them alongside the XTS5000. The P7100 radios blew away the Motorola product, especially when we compared the accessories.
The P7100 looks, feels and has proved to be far more rugged than the XTS. When we looked at the enhanced vehicular chargers, the Motorola product looked nice but was very flimsy. When using a speaker mic with the antenna on top, something common in public safety, the P7100 has a very nice accessory connector with an RF interface. The Motorola uses a bulky adaptor arrangement that often fails in a way that leaves a small piece of metal inside the radio to short things out. On the other hand the P7100 mic itself, made by Otto, isn't very rugged and we go through them far more than we should.
If I'm going to be honest I have to tell you that we have had some audio issues, scan problems and some other minor things. The good news is that our vendor and the manufacturer have been wonderful in how they've dealt with these issues. Firmware and DSP upgrades are easily accomplished in the field using the standard programming cable and software. M/A-Com has even incorporated some changes we requested because they saw value in it. Those same changes we requested of Motorola in their XTS series and their response was something to the effect of us not spending nearly enough money with them to justify their engineering time. Yeah, well we spend even less with them now.
My personal VHF P7100 is something I use daily at work and on the ham bands. It is immersion rated and I actually tested that on a fire by having one of the guys nail it with a 2.5" hose, full blast. I picked up the radio and called dispatch for a radio check....loud and clear.
I do have to say that I liked the analog audio of the XTS better than the P7100. P25 performance in the P7100 has always been superior. Both the P7100 and M7100 radios all seem to have this loud pop as the receiver closes squelch, even with the volume turned all the way down. The Motorola was so quiet that if someone had a really strong RF signal they could key and unkey and if they didn't say anything the XTS receiver would mute and unmute so quietly that you wouldn't know it was happening. That was one of the few impressive things about the Motorola and the pop is my only real pet peeve about the M/A-Com radios.
One final comment: Programmer rocks. With a single software package I can program the entire product line. I can take a program written for a P7100 portable and dump it into a M7100 radio or anything else I want. With Motorola I still have to juggle a host of other software packages and write, from scratch, programs for mobile and portable radios. Did I mention that Programmer lets me updated firmware and DSP code, that I don't have to purchase anything additional? I love this software and V20, the latest version, is even better yet. The down side is that they now use this Windows style license scheme for the software that has caused some huge problems but the software itself is the best in the industry.
