APX7000 P25 Multi-Band Radio

[Jay911]

Comm programmers for the county states radios (portables) sell for $4000 - $5000 a piece.

That's not as bad as others are indicating. I wonder how many bells and/or whistles are involved in that price.

IIRC, my last purchase of an XTL mobile was $5600ish CDN, and the XTS was in the same neighborhood.. so maybe the APX is right down the street, if not one block over

 

[XTS3000]

Ok; someone just brought this up in a new thread, which I've linked over here... so, what was the verdict? Is anyone using these in production service now, and how's that working out for you?

What do the ground-pounders think of them?

It's one hell of a radio! The audio in digital is stunningly clear and sharp, audio in analog is great. The audio out of the main speaker is extremely loud while never distorting even at 100% volume. This is the loudest radio i've ever heard, while also being the clearest audio. However..... the audio from the small speaker on the data side is LAME, basically useless if used by itself. You can select user profiles from the menu and select both speakers, main speaker only, or small speaker only. The audio from the small speaker is very quiet even at 100% volume

Firmware is very important in these APX7000's/7500. Firmware R03 and below is very bad, but with R04 they cleared up many of the DSP's audio problems.

It takes some time to get used to a dual sided radio. I find myself using the small top display more then the main data screen. I'm thinking that this dual sided radio many not be for everyone. Keep in mind that the radio was designed for police/fire/ems, not ham operators.

CPS programming takes some getting used to, and you need a pretty fast computer to run the CPS. On older computers the CPS is very laggy and unresponsive.

There are Development APX's on eBay that have development firmware. These radios are completely worthless as the CPS will not upgrade the firmware in these units. Stay clear of any APX radio with the letter "D" in the firmware or DSP or tuning partition.

As it stands right now, firmware upgrades are free from MOL. There is the option in the CPS for an ibutton for firmware upgrading, but no iButton is needed. It would not surprise me if someday moto may start charging $$ for firmware upgrades.

 

[2wayfreq]

Cool,
There is new CPS and Firmware Rev 5.0 on MOL. I think by the time I really get to mess with one of these, it'll change again.

 

[XTS3000]

At this point, I'm happy with the performance of R04 firmware, so will wait a bit to upgrade incase there is some bug in R05.

Receive performance seem to be about equal to that of the XTS5000.

 

[Jay911]

XTS, I am not certain on this from previous discussion: Can you have a scan list with members from all different bands the radio supports, or is each scan list limited to members from a single band?

 

[groftcc]

The scan list can have members of any band the radio is capable of operating on.

Craig

 

[tafische]

Still trying to get them out the door, but really like it so far. The biggest complaint I have as a user is the antenna size of the VHF/800. Really tall to fit in your chest turnout pocket. Other thing on the wish list is that is would decode/encode QC2. Also, I am not as familiar with the trunk programming yet, but have to get a few different trunk systems on it for mutual aid. Looks like it takes a hardware key instead of a software key and the other agencies only have soft keys. Still in the process of figuring this one out...but I think overall we are going to be very happy with the unit.

 

[davidgcet]

you can order a flash to enable the soft key, otherwise you must have the hard key. i don't have the option number handy, but it is available as of a few months ago.

 

[Mr_Observer]

Still trying to get them out the door, but really like it so far. The biggest complaint I have as a user is the antenna size of the VHF/800. Really tall to fit in your chest turnout pocket. Other thing on the wish list is that is would decode/encode QC2. Also, I am not as familiar with the trunk programming yet, but have to get a few different trunk systems on it for mutual aid. Looks like it takes a hardware key instead of a software key and the other agencies only have soft keys. Still in the process of figuring this one out...but I think overall we are going to be very happy with the unit.

The 7/8/V Antenna that they originally sold is a monster. I have just gotten used to getting poked in the armpit with mine. Motorola has a new one that is an inch and a half shorter (or so). I have not gotten one yet but I probably should.

 

[XTS3000]

you can order a flash to enable the soft key, otherwise you must have the hard key. i don't have the option number handy, but it is available as of a few months ago.

QA01749: Legacy SW System Key Enable

 

[N4DES]

The 7/8/V Antenna that they originally sold is a monster. I have just gotten used to getting poked in the armpit with mine. Motorola has a new one that is an inch and a half shorter (or so). I have not gotten one yet but I probably should.

I couldn't find any new 7/8/V antenna in MOL. The U/V antenna is about 3/4" shorter when I put them side by side. You sure you aren't looking at that one or maybe the 7/8/U which I'm sure is even shorter than all of them?

 

[davidgcet]

i saw an annoucement they were reducing the antenna, but i don't have any customers with the VHF/800 portable yet so i don't know if they have or not.

 

[rc50won]

There is a bug in R05 for APX (and in R15 for XTS 5000) too.

Dont do it!!!

The XTS 15 bug may have been fixed with the release of the newer control head sync file. I trashed an O3 control head with the older sync file but the newer sync file was able to program another O3 just fine.

APX 5 CPS in combination with V5 firmware may force narrow banding. We are not sure yet so I don't advise installing it.

Note that XTS CPS 15 now supports Windows 7.

Marshall

 

[XTS3000]

Narrowband will be an Flashport option in the APX for now, but eventually it will be forced after the mandate. The option Q507 will force the radio into narrowband operation right now. So if you don't have Q507, then you don't have to worry about narrowband for now.

I'm thinking after the cutoff date, Q507 will be forced into the radio when you do a normal firmware upgrade. Kinda like channel announcement was added to Astro25 radios when a normal firmware upgrade was performed - the flashcode changed after just a firmware upgrade,

 

[XTS3000]

What's making these antennas so long is the GPS portion of the antenna. Maybe Moto will release a non-GPS dual band antenna someday

 

[APX6000]

I hope to c one of these before end of 2012.

 

[Bubba1661]

Apx7000

Well Guys, I'm sitting here with 2 of them and man what a radio. This thing is awesome. Sound quality is crystal clear.

 

[Mr_Observer]

I see that someone hopped into the time machine and traveled back to 2010!~

 

[PJH]

I guess its better than starting a new thread

FWIW CPS9/FW9 was released last week.

 

[Jay911]

PJH - how do you feel about the UI for APX CPS?

I think M wants us to feel good about the disaster that is ASTRO25 CPS and say "at least I don't have to program an APX today".

I have just one 7500 to do and I spent an entire weekend trying to get it right. I didn't migrate an XTL codeplug over with the tool because I'd heard it doesn't work all that well anyway.