Mind you I like the looks, but that's not a reason to purchase something for P.S. and well they needed something new, and definitly had to improve on the very "Kludgy" O-2 head. I suggested to one of my departments to buy only the "APX brick" when forced to Phase II in a few years and use the original O-5 accy's that came with the XTL-5000 radio. It also would save about $1,500.00 for each radio, plus the re-install.
BTW mother M raised the price of the APX $1,000.00 overnight when they found out these agencies were being told to buy Phase II radios and nothing else.
I told the Chiefs council to publicly state that they were buying Harris and let M know about it. I am waiting for M's reaction when 13 agencies go with Harris after their attempted ripoff. I bet they come back costing less than the origianl price just to maintain their stranglehold.
The O2 head has its own market, the ruggedness of potentially being mounted to a pump panel, or maybe on police patrol bikes?? My likening of the E5 is coming from the current usage of the O7. We have been using that with our APX mobiles, but it has been a hell of a time getting any of the seasoned folks in my agency to understand how to use them. We still have some XTL’s floating around, all with an O5, and using something like an E5 would bring back that simplicity for the guys here.
Multiple things in the Moto price raising.
1) Did moto have phase 2 option enabled in their radio on the initial quote? Pricey option- yes, should it be that expensive- probably not. Phase 2 costs a bit of money to get involved in the first place, probably why they charge so much for it in subscriber units.
2) Watch out with Harris. They have great equipment- if you plan to only stick to trunking an never use conventional. I have tested all of their stuff, even have a unity XG100 floating in my fleet, and a licensed copy of RPM2. It is a good unit, but the scanning function as well as ease of use goes out the window if you think you will have trunking and conventional channels in the same “zone”. They will tell you they can create zones that contain both, but then it gets super messy. Furthermore, they (engineers with Harris) didn’t acknowledge this one when I asked, the radios are not capable of scanning trunked channels while on a conventional channel- even if you made a custom scan list telling it to. Will not, however my old XT series fly through everything I need at the moment, with the exception of an incoming phase 2.
All of my Harris testing was on an XL200P, it was a great unit. Just be mindful that if you intend to use both conventional and trunking in the same zone, that my advice would be to stray away.