Digital Portable Radio Reccomdations

[rbwatson24]

I am looking for Digital portable radios that may be reccomended. We are about to purchase digital radios and we are trying to decide which radio to purchase.

[Rescue601]

Its not that simple.

1. What do you have for an existing system?

2. Why are you wanting to replace it?

3. Do you have a bunch of money for engineering and design?

[rbwatson24]

Digital conversion

We are actually being forced to convert as a requirement. All agencies in our area are converting. We are currently using VHF conventional with DTMF paging. We have a motorola repeater that is digital capable right now. I am inclined to stick with motorola just to keep all features available. We currently have Kenwood protables and they lose a lot of features when used with the motorola repeater. I know the repeater will not be replaced but the department has the option of getting Icom digital P25 portables for free or spending the extra money ourselves to upgrade. Also the tech guys for the COG (council of governments) are wanting to change us from OTA DTMF station alerting to Internet alerting using IP-223s. I am leary of this because it requires internet connection and we are on a WAN (wireless microwave) internet connection that fails too often. I think the tech guys are trying to go too technical and too many "toys" to do the dame thing we can do OTA and OTA also gives us the ability to send confirmation to the dispatch center that the station radio received the alert. I have been tasked with doing research to find which radio works best for our use and also has the best vocoder for our use.

[LVFD301]

We are actually being forced to convert as a requirement. All agencies in our area are converting. We are currently using VHF conventional with DTMF paging. We have a motorola repeater that is digital capable right now. I am inclined to stick with motorola just to keep all features available. We currently have Kenwood protables and they lose a lot of features when used with the motorola repeater. I know the repeater will not be replaced but the department has the option of getting Icom digital P25 portables for free or spending the extra money ourselves to upgrade. Also the tech guys for the COG (council of governments) are wanting to change us from OTA DTMF station alerting to Internet alerting using IP-223s. I am leary of this because it requires internet connection and we are on a WAN (wireless microwave) internet connection that fails too often. I think the tech guys are trying to go too technical and too many "toys" to do the dame thing we can do OTA and OTA also gives us the ability to send confirmation to the dispatch center that the station radio received the alert. I have been tasked with doing research to find which radio works best for our use and also has the best vocoder for our use.

Find dealers to give you demo radios to use on the repeater.

What features do you think you will lose?

You are talking about the repeater being P25 and not Mototrbo, right?