Yeah I was trying to explain why Wave will be overkill and that’s what I was thinking. Most environments just want a guy on his phone to listen while he’s on vacation. Any streaming server will do that fine. The system is truly designed to be mission critical and can run a public safety dispatch center. Even though marketing material show the hotel manager talking from his phone he would be better severed carrying an SL300 in addition to his phone.
I don’t think I would want someone who is dedicated on a site with appropriate coverage to use anything but a two way radio - exception being dispatchers with a redundant hardline to the wave sever.
We run MOTOTRBO 7550e handhelds at work on a Motorola Capacity Plus system. I waited a couple of years for our local Motorola vendors to come up with something - anything - on Wave, so we could use smartphones offsite to communicate with our Maintenance and Production teams.
Motorola was useless for us in this respect; time stood still while we waited. Finally we tired of waiting for them.
Last year we set up a trial LMR interop system (single talk group) with ESChat and it prototyped so well we took the plunge and purchased an ESChat/JPS interop 10-talkgroup interface, paired it with donor radios set to our required talk groups and it’s worked great. We have our Mototrbo radio system interfaced with manager ESChat setups, and we extend our LMR system range with a couple of Sonim XP7 portables with ESChat, giving permission to the necessary LMR talkgroups.
Setup of the JPS unit took a bit of time to finesse the audio and it’s quite clear, unless users yell into speaker mics that are nestled too close to their mouths, but that also makes for audio issues on the radio system as well. With decent wifi or LTE reception the audio quality on ESChat between smartphones is superb. We can also verify location of the Sonim techs using the ESChat location services, and we’ve locked down the XP7 to always run ESChat so there are minimal operator issues.
A huge benefit of ESChat is you can interface between various systems and manufacturers quite easily, as long as there are interface cables for the radio hardware, and ESChat has a huge amount of these to suit most common 2-way radios.
A disadvantage of ESChat is the fiddling necessary to set up the radio interface, and you need extra donor radios to setup the talk groups you desire. I imagine Wave would be much simpler in that respect, but that simplicity has a large price tag attached.
Also, with our setup I am unable as an ESChat smartphone user to do special group or private calls to our mototrbo LMR system; I will see a talk group name come up (eg, “Maintenance Dispatch”) but cannot ID individual mototrbo radio users. This is supposed to be possible with a Tait LMR system using ESChat, but that is moot as we’re a Motorola shop.
There is also a delay in smartphone Tx via ESChat to the lmr system, so you have to PTT on Android or iPhone and wait 1-1.5s to speak or the first syllable or so is lost. No big deal for us; when I check in with my team the comms aren’t exactly life-or-death in importance, I’m checking in on equipment repair status.
Wish we had gone with ESChat much sooner than we did.
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