Motorola wins new slers contract!!!!

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prc117f

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What does this mean exactly? Are us scanner listeners getting are hobby back? Will be be able to hear two way radio traffic again once M takes over? What is the timeline as far as the system going in to service under M and not Harris?

Nope because the type of hobbyists have changed making encryption necessary. I will leave it at that :)
 

ElroyJetson

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DO NOT ASK ME FOR HELP PROGRAMMING YOUR RADIO. NO.
I made an inquiry with the DMS asking for confirmation since the State of Florida has made no PUBLIC announcement.

I received a reply. Salient portion quoted below:

I can confirm that on March 13 the Florida Department of Management Services published a Notice of Intent to Award a contract to Motorola Solutions, Inc., and that the department has received a Notice of Protest from Harris Corporation.


So, yes, this is happening.

But a notice of intent to award a contact is not the same as actually awarding a contract.

It does seem likely (90 percent at least) that a bid solicitation has previously gone out and Motorola responded to it with a proposal.

I won't go beyond 90 percent since Florida AND certain vendors all have a history of playing games with contracts and the bid competition process.

I think I still have copies, pulled from the county public records department, showing that way back in the late 80s, my county published a solicitation for a county wide data network "to include provisions for a future 800 MHz public safety radio system", and a copy of Motorola's response that said, "Motorola does not provide data networks but when the county issues a solicitation for a public safety radio system, Motorola will actively bid." as I recall. This response was deliberatly misconstrued, in writing, in an additional document, by the County contract administration team, saying, essentially. "Motorola offers NO BID on the radio system proposal." In fact there never WAS a formally issued proposal for the county's 800 MHz radio system. The local Ericsson/GE sales office made a proposal which was accepted under non-competitive conditions....and probably that was illegal.

Typical Florida shenanigans. I expect this story continues to be retold to this day regarding other radio contracts.
 

KC3ECJ

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I am probably biasd by The state of Minnesota choosing Motorola statewide for the P25 800MHz (ARMER) system with nearly every county went with, even the ones in the boonies joined. Some of the counties that did not change were in heavy tree areas lousy for 800MHz and the cost to change out all the squad and portable radios which would be cost prohibited. The MN State Patrol uses it throughout the state where it's feesable and still VHF-Hi where ARMER is not implemented. Their VHF-Hi mobile radios are programmed with a VHF-Hi channel to communicate with the State patrol statewide PSAP in Roseville, MN (a suburb of Minneapolis) when those units come to the Metro area since they all don't have ARMER radios issued to them.

The system is very robust and has worked fantastically when the 35W bridge that collapsed a few years ago using the Interop talkgroups so all the first responders could communicate. They system went though it's biggest challenge to handle all the Super Bowl radio traffic for the game last month. I believe they are looking at logs on system performance for the days and the day leading up to the game. The prelim report is that it worked great with some occasional channel grant delays. Some systems like Hennepin Co. sumulcast has so much traffic that they were once down to only 1 voice channel. I would believe they used most of the alt control channel freqs for voice traffic. As usage increase and Phase I radio's are replaced with APX's at some point Phase II could be added for busy systems if need be.

Except for the usual simulcast distortion that affects a scanner user (Including myself) had to endure but the subscribers radios worked very well. I was out of town but I have a couple of XTS2500 programmed with all the interop talkgroups I could not pickup with my BC996XT. I need the XTS's to listen to the county I live in due to the simulcast system being a tough nut to pickup using a scanner. The issues affect quite a a large listening area even the first responder's 2500's have some difficultly with it. I have heard it first hand from one their radios and the people who say those radio's are immune are full of it. All of my XTS's were programmed with on-affiliate scan and due to the limits on the number of scan list members it makes a poor scanner and mine just sit on a talkgroup for kmy area that is extremely hard to pickup due to the site and being almost the same amount of distance from two diffrent placed sites. It sucks when you live on elevation that tops 1,000ft ASL.

The system is robust and fantastic as system techs and Motorola did a good job in the design and implementing system and it's still going strong after being on the air for nearly 15 years. Owning several models of Motorola radios, their quality is good. One agency uses EF Johnson radios and in my opinion sound awful. That was a must and since the system uses CAI other vendor's radios were approved to be used on the system. In my mind Motorola is the king of all two-way radio equipment. It would be nice if they could have an option for just receive only without the need to affiliate without the use ot the non-affiliate scan method. When I worked in Television, the station had to purchase 3 Astro mobiles programmed by the state with legit RIDS and only the home sites for each talkgroup so they could not affilite on a different site dragging traffic on a site it should not be normally be on. Also no transmit excpt to affiliate when changing to the small amount of talkgroups approved with particular agency and that those TG's were added. The no trasmit as setup in the Zone Controller and the mics were removed so there would be no way to accidentally key up and get a channel grant. Now that there are scanners that do P25 trunking, thoee radios are not used realdbility helpful when a particular TG was needed. When the system became operational there were no P25 scanners out yet. Hopefully the scanner manufacturers are able to design scanners that do not suffer from the wrath of simulcast systems.

OpenSky is junk in my opinion and should not be used for PS comms. The State of Pennsylvania dumped OS in certain areas of the state (I believe the Penns State Police), Las Vegas dumped their OS system for poor performance and coverage and installed a Motorola PI system and have great results. The city of Milwaukee, WI went OpenSky and had a ton of problems and the roll out was slow and since I don't live there anymore I don't know if they are still having issues. Naperville/Aurora Illinois went with OS and with the freqs they have it could in theory support 50 voice channels. Again there hasn't been reports of serous issues public comments on any problems with it. In Minnesota, Motorola was not the lowest bidder on a contract to design the system, but the lowest bit can be ignored if a case of reliability can be considered. Minnesota's (MnDOT, Department of Transportation) "Mother M" the contract and since they were the owners of ARMER they chose a company that build quality systems. Thank got they did pick Motorola not select broken sky. ARMER's interop between agencies are seamless when the crap hits the fan. Motorola P25 CAI systems kick butt.

Yeah, in PA they are starting to replace the state's OpenSky with P25.

With the PA Turnpike as it is, the plow/road crew trucks, roadside assistance trucks, and the local fire/EMS that respond to the Turnpike are on analog. The State Police that covers the Turnpike is on OpenSky patched over to the analog repeaters.

The OpenSky audio is very robotic and when there are coverage dropouts it gets all scrambled up.

The dispatchers have analog audio on the analog side, they don't have the OpenSky sounding voice.
 

RFI-EMI-GUY

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Yeah, in PA they are starting to replace the state's OpenSky with P25.

With the PA Turnpike as it is, the plow/road crew trucks, roadside assistance trucks, and the local fire/EMS that respond to the Turnpike are on analog. The State Police that covers the Turnpike is on OpenSky patched over to the analog repeaters.

The OpenSky audio is very robotic and when there are coverage dropouts it gets all scrambled up.

The dispatchers have analog audio on the analog side, they don't have the OpenSky sounding voice.
When Opensky was released, there really was nothing comparable. There was no P25 trunking standard. There was no P25 TDMA. It was a good solution and theoretically could have worked out well. 800 Mhz propagation is poor in forested areas and thus a lot of fill sites would be required to fully implement a statewide system. Then you have the expense of backhaul which adds up for all those phone pole fill sites. I was pretty excited about it when M/A Com first announced it. The problem is with the details on any technology. It really is functionally a lot like IP connected DMR multi site and that has proven to be a fine solution. Truth is it was 18 years ahead of its time. It was also burdened by the heavy cost of the network switch.

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KC3ECJ

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When Opensky was released, there really was nothing comparable. There was no P25 trunking standard. There was no P25 TDMA. It was a good solution and theoretically could have worked out well. 800 Mhz propagation is poor in forested areas and thus a lot of fill sites would be required to fully implement a statewide system. Then you have the expense of backhaul which adds up for all those phone pole fill sites. I was pretty excited about it when M/A Com first announced it. The problem is with the details on any technology. It really is functionally a lot like IP connected DMR multi site and that has proven to be a fine solution. Truth is it was 18 years ahead of its time. It was also burdened by the heavy cost of the network switch.

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When was Motorola Type II and it's derivatives introduced?

PROS/CONS of Type II VS OpenSky?
 

RFI-EMI-GUY

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When was Motorola Type II and it's derivatives introduced?

PROS/CONS of Type II VS OpenSky?

Motorola Privacy Plus was introduced in about 1982 and I had the distinction of helping troubleshoot the first SmartNet type 1 system (Miami) in about 1986. It was a derivative of Privacy plus, but added centralized wired console interface and receiver voting. Type 2 was introduced just a couple years later to fix capacity and access time issues with SN 1. Opensky came many years later and is a different animal. I think the pros and cons would be pretty lengthy with Opensky having some clear advantages for wide area deployments.
 

jparks29

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Opensky is a data network that carries voice.
Type II is a voice network that carries data.

That's about the most generalized explanation I could give.
 

RFI-EMI-GUY

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Opensky is a data network that carries voice.
Type II is a voice network that carries data.

That's about the most generalized explanation I could give.

Well,,,,Type II barely carries any data, besides limited control channel OP bits and ID's. In analog form, Motorola had some SCADA overlays that conveyed FSK tones through a voice talkgroup. The voters were not too happy with that task. Then there were Securenet Digital Voice overlays and finally some APCO 25 "CAI" which was basically the same old 3600 control channel and Astro digital repeaters. Then HSD (high speed data), which is not such high speed in today's expectation.. All this confusing progression reaped Motorola tons of money in subscriber and infrastructure upgrades until P25 trunking standard was established. Yet still, there are proprietary bits in an ASTRO25 system. When buying P25 from any vendor, "Buyer Beware".
 

jparks29

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Well,,,,Type II barely carries any data, besides limited control channel OP bits and ID's. In analog form, Motorola had some SCADA overlays that conveyed FSK tones through a voice talkgroup. The voters were not too happy with that task. Then there were Securenet Digital Voice overlays and finally some APCO 25 "CAI" which was basically the same old 3600 control channel and Astro digital repeaters. Then HSD (high speed data), which is not such high speed in today's expectation.. All this confusing progression reaped Motorola tons of money in subscriber and infrastructure upgrades until P25 trunking standard was established. Yet still, there are proprietary bits in an ASTRO25 system. When buying P25 from any vendor, "Buyer Beware".

Uh huh.

It's almost like I said it was designed for voice.. :p
 

RFI-EMI-GUY

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Is this the best argument they have?

“The design proposed by Motorola is unreliable, because it uses certain microwave lengths that are subject to rain fade or rain attenuation,” said Karen Walker, an Attorney representing Harris Corp.

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MSS-Dave

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Is this the best argument they have?

“The design proposed by Motorola is unreliable, because it uses certain microwave lengths that are subject to rain fade or rain attenuation,” said Karen Walker, an Attorney representing Harris Corp.

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That's hilariously funny. I mean like Harris has access to different microwave equipment and they would do different path lengths and frequencies than Motorola? They just need to go back to the beginning to where Commnet Ericsson/
M/A Com / Harris built the system as it is now and look at the performance reports, and look at all the complaints from the agencies that use the system regarding coverage and quality for the money spent.

Agency I used to work for got pitched hard to use SLERS about 10 years ago. Portable coverage was needed in a large metro area. We knew it wouldn't work because of the tower locations but we had to prove it anyway. Took 3 minutes. The answer to that from the rep was to use vehicular repeaters like Highway Patrol does. Our answer to that was go away or build a site somewhere in the middle of the metro area instead of outside of the metro area by 10 miles. To my knowledge they never built that Metro site.

The amount of money that's going to be spent on litigation to get this whole deal finished up is going to be stupid. Seems like every time there is a competition between Motorola and Harris, the loser sues the **** out of the winner every time. Well, at least here in Flori-Duh. Business By Lawsuit.

The real losers are the taxpayers.
 

RFI-EMI-GUY

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snip

The real losers are the taxpayers.

True on that. The state should build the system themselves and use the actual P25 specs, not the proprietary features, to competitively bid the system components and separately the subscribers. This winner takes all approach has been a waste of taxpayer money.



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MSS-Dave

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Harris is a junk radio system motorola all the way.
You know, if you were to compare exact apples to exact apples between Harris and Motorola on a system like a fully standard compliant P25 trunked system, I'd almost be willing to bet the two systems would work equally well provided the systems were engineered correctly and soundly. The issue comes in when they add in vendor proprietary "things" like OpenSky, Astro25, EDACS-ESK, etc etc which effectively locks out open competition once you have one of the systems in place. When the State or Municipality goes to upgrade or add to the radio system, almost always they have to get permission to do sole source procurement. That's where the sparks start to fly in County Commission meetings for example whenever the department responsible for procurement has to take that to get the permission from the County Commissioners to talk to the incumbent vendor and the other one(s) start to raise hell about monopolies and protesting that decision then will protest the bid awards when they don't win then will protest most anything else trying to get their foot back in the door.

My county has a very large Motorola Astro 25 7.x system with at least 10 sites and somewhere around 18,000 radios on the system. Fighting between Motorola and Harris was pretty big when all that stuff was going on. The money in this system is Small Potatoes to the close to 1 billion dollars that the state will probably end up spending on new SLERS.
 

RFI-EMI-GUY

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Harris is a junk radio system motorola all the way.

I will have to disagree with you, and I agree with MSS_Dave.

You can actually write a competitive specification for an entire radio system based on user functionality and performance requirements and the outcome will result in a quality system, but not a bargain by any means. There is often very small price difference between Motorola and Harris, which is odd to say the least.

One problem is that the vendors want "their fair advantage" which basically means they will stomp around and cry boo hoo at pre-bid demanding certain functionality or specifications be added to the spec that offer the buying user agency little return, but will ensure it becomes a "Motorola Deal" or a Harris Deal".

Both vendors are guilty of engineering their systems in a manner that goes against the spirit of the APCO25 charter. It makes it difficult and impossible to mix vendors for infrastructure components, and creates systems that are overly complicated and expensive for small scale deployments.
 

seth21w

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My county had Motorola phase 1 p25 system, and when it came time to UPGRADE to phase 2 Harris undercut Motorola, and won the bid. They installed a standard p25 phase 2 system not a retrofit of an older system and I've never seen so many comm failures. Some of you may prefer it but it's not reliable in my county.
 
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