I have seen in the past two years many of the oil refineries and transport companies switch to MotoTrbo radios. This has been mostly due to a huge push from the local Motorola shops pushing digital MotoTrbo on companies to comply with narrow-band requirements. In many cases, the radios these locations had, could be programmed for narrow-band. But the sales people said they needed to go digital and buy new radios as well. I deal with nearly 100 companies in the oil and gas industry that have gone MotoTrbo due to drinking the salesman's "Kool-Aid".
Some other motivators have been: the XPR6550 handheld comes in a FM IS rated version, certified at the time of order with the correct battery, they are cheaper than repairing the radios they already had, and they have a longer battery life.
The company I work for is now in the process of switching to MotoTrbo as well to fall in line with the rest of the oil industry.
I'm guessing it is not so much of drinking the salespersons "Kool-Aid" but rather the fact that by purchasing DMR, one instantly doubles their talk paths for the same price as buying an analogue repeater, plus the issues of reduced coverage caused by going to NFM vs FM. I think that most issues with DMR is the difficulty in hobbiest ability to monitor it. Hence the 'drink the Kool-Aid' comments.
When you are looking at replacing an aging, broken down fleet of radios, or replacing radios no longer produced, regardless if they can narrowband or not, it just makes sense to go to a technology like DMR. I am now using DMR with the client I now work for, and I must say I would rather grab the XPR-6550, and have uniform, clean, crisp audio, than the inconsistent, usually bad, signal strength dependant analogue radio.
Yes my XPR-6550 is IS rated (oilfield work) but so is the Vertex 92x series/Waris radios that are being phased out. Regardless of current status or not, this IS the direction communications are going. I would rather be on the leading edge than the trailing edge.
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