Buying more Harris!

[fasteddy64]

Radios vary in age from 3 years to new. The battery problem is present on all ages of the radio. Did y'all evaluate other radios (Moto, EFJ, etc.) before purchase?

BTW, that was not my radio.

We evaluated the Moto APX-7000 and gave it back.

For our city staying with Harris made the most sense.

 

[fasteddy64]

If you'd had some XTS5Ks to deploy for evaluation, there's absolutely no way you'd have stuck with Harris.

I have multiple examples of both the 7100 portables and 5Ks as well. There's really no comparison. The 7100 works and is reliable but may be the worst sounding portable radio ever made in the public safety market. The 5K simply outclasses the 7100. It isn't even close.

For virtually every kind of radio activity I had to deal with in my years as a full time radio tech, I kept a
variety of radios programmed up to support my customers, and to support almost any of them I
could grab a 7100 off the shelf and use it, or grab a 5000 off the shelf and use it. After trying both, many
times in many applications, I just eventually stopped using the 7100s entirely except for using them on a proprietary (edacs) system where the 5K won't work.

Going inside them, the general impression is "M/A-Com designed the jaguar/7100 series radios that's built cheap like a 90's cell phone. But Motorola really ENGINEERED a superlative platform with the XTS5000.".

Really, it's true. A P7100 is constructed almost exactly the same way as a Nokia 2160. CHEAP.

All I can say is that we switched from Motorola to Harris (M/A-com back then) in 2006 and I am pleased we will be staying with Harris. For us, the 7100P with the Stone Mountain Juno speaker mic has given us flawless performance. The same goes for EDACS. I wish they weren't phasing it out.

 

[otter9309]

We evaluated the Moto APX-7000 and gave it back.

For our city staying with Harris made the most sense.

Why did y'all demo a multi-band radio, and then go with a single band? What did you like/dislike about the APX?

 

[fasteddy64]

Why did y'all demo a multi-band radio, and then go with a single band? What did you like/dislike about the APX?

That was the radio the Motorola rep brought me.

I had no problem with the 7000, but at the same time there was nothing about it that made me want to switch.

 

[RayAir]

Newer XG model Harris radios are for sure noticeably lighter. With modern battery technology the weight of them and even size overall has significantly dropped. Have your department opt for the p7300 series. I do believe they are lighter the the 7200 series and you'll still maintain your IMBE vocoder. It's not until you enter the XG series where the AMBE 2 Vocoders became standard equipment on radios ( though I could be wrong;depending on what mode your operating in)

It is not up to any department. All radios are bought, programmed, and deployed through the county.

I'll ask the radio shop if they have any plans to go to the next gen Harris line.

 

[rescue161]

From a user's side of things Harris may be okay, but I can tell you from the maintenance side that users are reporting the opposite. As well as us on the maintenance side of things that the grass is not always greener on the Harris side.

 

[ElroyJetson]

Any sales rep who knew his business would have left an apx6000 in your band to demo, not a 7000. The trick is to get your hoped-for customer to see lots of value and NOT lots of price tag.

My (limited) experience with the current generation Moto and Harris products tells me that Moto still engineers the radio much better from a physical engineering standpoint. Better made, and, as far as I can tell, easier to repair in those instances where repairs are feasible. (Since not every shop and not every tech has invested in component level repairs on PC boards that are nearly if not entirely composed of only surface mounted components.

 

[rescue161]

I can tell you that we repair quasi-component level on the XTS2500 (SMT diodes, SMT resistors, SMT switches, Volume/channel selectors and SMA connectors). As of right now, we are not allowed to touch the XG100s due to them being under warranty, but we send a LOT of them back for repair. The warranty will be up shortly and I'm sure we'll be repairing a lot of the XG100 series.

 

[fasteddy64]

Maintenance on our 7100's has been good, the main problem always seems to be volume/channel selectors, we replace a fair amount of them. All of our 7100's are around 8 to 9 years old. We do our own maintenance and that has worked well for us. The XG-75's that we have are about 3 years old and currently only a few staff members and our training division are the only ones issued that radio. As of today there has not been one failure, no need for any kind of maintenance.
Maybe we have just been lucky?

I have one XG-100 but no one carries it because we really have no need for a multi-band radio.

 

[R8000]

We evaluated the Moto APX-7000 and gave it back.

For our city staying with Harris made the most sense.

Google search "danecom problems" LoL

 

[ElroyJetson]

To be perfectly fair about it, a system can be engineered to perfection and work perfectly....and then another signal can pop up that's not part of that system, and create intermod problems on multiple system channels. It's one of the hazards of RF engineering. You can't account for all the variables, one of which is the FCC assigning new users to frequencies that may cause intermod problems.

Finding the source of such an intermod problem can be a stone b***h. Ever had to tote a full sized bench model spectrum analyzer to a site, set up antennas, start sweeping and capturing data, and HOPE that the supposed intermod-causing alien signal will show up and you can capture it well enough to at least identify the frequency of it? But that's not even the first stage of the analysis. First you
have to figure out if it's an input side intermod problem or an output side problem.

I've had to do that. It took days to track down and figure out, working exclusively on that problem.

Fox hunts can be fun. But not that kind!

I would not elect to blame the system designer for intermod problems if they had performed due diligence pre-installation modelling and testing to ensure that all system frequencies in use are compatible with each other.

 

[fasteddy64]

Google search "danecom problems" LoL

I did.
Sorry they are having trouble.

I guess no other brand of radio system has ever encountered any difficulties?

 

[R8000]

I did.
Sorry they are having trouble.

I guess no other brand of radio system has ever encountered any difficulties?

Glitches and bugs to work out is understandable.

Forgetting 4 tower sites that is critical to P25 Linear simulcast operation is a big oops. Then coming back after the contract has been signed asking for 5 million to build these 4 missed tower sites ? Ouch.

How does an RF engineer at Harris AND a consultant miss 4 tower sites in the system design ? In P25 simulcast tower spacing it critical. No wonder the system didn't work when they tried it.

Sorry, but something isn't adding up.

 

[ElroyJetson]

I persist in being critical of systems that worked rather well in analog trunking modes that covered a large county quite well on four sites, and then they get "upgraded" (I use the word with great derision here) to an all digital linear simulcast system which requires, say, a dozen fully duplicated sites and many millions of dollars more to get the same equivalent coverage that the system provided before spending cubic dollars for this "upgrade".

Honestly I am STILL not sold on the idea that digital voice radio systems are actually a better, more cost effective communications solution as compared to analog systems.

Despite what the salesdroids say, I have yet to see a single real world example where radios in digital mode even managed to equal the functional range and performance of radios in analog mode under the same operational conditions.

While there are unquestionably some advantages to a fully digital radio system in terms of configuration, traffic management, etc, when it comes to end-to-end voice communications performance, digital still lags behind analog in several critical ways, chief of which is the cost to performance ratio.

 

[DisasterGuy]

We have been using EDACS for 15 years and are migrating to P25 with Harris after a very competitive open bid and product evaluations, subscriber and FNE, of several vendors. What I will say is that in a very competitive environment Harris tends to be much cheaper and also has many advantages from the FNE side of things. We have also had the XG75p, XG25p, XG75M and XG25M along with XG100M in service in moderate quantities for a few years now with almost zero problems.

We have never had the battery issues mentioned in this thread with any radio (over 1500 in service) and the vast majority of issues we see with 15 year old P7100 radios is PTT kits (a 5 minute $7 repair) and occasional switch kit replacements.

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

 

[fasteddy64]

I persist in being critical of systems that worked rather well in analog trunking modes that covered a large county quite well on four sites, and then they get "upgraded" (I use the word with great derision here) to an all digital linear simulcast system which requires, say, a dozen fully duplicated sites and many millions of dollars more to get the same equivalent coverage that the system provided before spending cubic dollars for this "upgrade".

Honestly I am STILL not sold on the idea that digital voice radio systems are actually a better, more cost effective communications solution as compared to analog systems.

Despite what the salesdroids say, I have yet to see a single real world example where radios in digital mode even managed to equal the functional range and performance of radios in analog mode under the same operational conditions.

While there are unquestionably some advantages to a fully digital radio system in terms of configuration, traffic management, etc, when it comes to end-to-end voice communications performance, digital still lags behind analog in several critical ways, chief of which is the cost to performance ratio.

I guess I remain optimistic based on our experience. We have been using ProVoice for many years and it has been great. We are expecting the same good service from P25 Phase II.

 

[fasteddy64]

We have been using EDACS for 15 years and are migrating to P25 with Harris after a very competitive open bid and product evaluations, subscriber and FNE, of several vendors. What I will say is that in a very competitive environment Harris tends to be much cheaper and also has many advantages from the FNE side of things. We have also had the XG75p, XG25p, XG75M and XG25M along with XG100M in service in moderate quantities for a few years now with almost zero problems.

We have never had the battery issues mentioned in this thread with any radio (over 1500 in service) and the vast majority of issues we see with 15 year old P7100 radios is PTT kits (a 5 minute $7 repair) and occasional switch kit replacements.

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

We are quite pleased with our 7100 series portables as well. All of ours are used with speaker mic's (Stone Mountain Juno's) so we don't use the radio's PTT so no issues there. We replace volume control/channel selectors from time to time but that is really about it.

 

[ElroyJetson]

I guess I remain optimistic based on our experience. We have been using ProVoice for many years and it has been great. We are expecting the same good service from P25 Phase II.

I don't question that you can get excellent coverage and service from a Phase II system. But it will most LIKELY cost MANY millions of dollars more to achieve that level of coverage and service than it cost to get equal coverage and service from any of the major legacy analog voice trunking systems.

We the taxpayers are footing a much larger bill to get equivalent performance.

Spending extra millions to get the same coverage area seems efficient to me ONLY from a salesman's perspective: Efficiently separating the city/county/taxpayers from millions of dollars.

From any other perspective, I see it as a waste of tax dollars, an inefficient utilization of money, and inefficient usage of resources.

You should never have to pay more and do more to get similar results. That is not efficient. It is not the hallmark of an ADVANCE in technology.

 

[fasteddy64]

I don't question that you can get excellent coverage and service from a Phase II system. But it will most LIKELY cost MANY millions of dollars more to achieve that level of coverage and service than it cost to get equal coverage and service from any of the major legacy analog voice trunking systems.

We the taxpayers are footing a much larger bill to get equivalent performance.

Spending extra millions to get the same coverage area seems efficient to me ONLY from a salesman's perspective: Efficiently separating the city/county/taxpayers from millions of dollars.

From any other perspective, I see it as a waste of tax dollars, an inefficient utilization of money, and inefficient usage of resources.

You should never have to pay more and do more to get similar results. That is not efficient. It is not the hallmark of an ADVANCE in technology.

I guess we will see.

 

[DisasterGuy]

I disagree about the cost difference but yes phase 2 in theory requires more towers than phase 1. It is however far more spectral efficient.

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