Batboard

Wondering if anybody else has had this issue with their APX's. Our Department recently purchased APX8000XE radios with standard and extended batteries.

From our lot of standard batteries, a few of them would display "Wrong Battery" on the radio display and a red battery icon. It would not allow you to operate the radio without a bonk every few seconds. After troubleshooting with Motorola (changing the battery type in CPS, etc), they sent us new batteries. Our dealer told us that we were given the wrong batteries and there's a new type we need.

So we receive our new lot of batteries and a couple of them cause the radio to work without issue but when you place them in the multi-unit charger, the display reads "Unknown Battery," but the battery charges fine. The other day, one of our firefighters showed me the display on his radio and the battery gauge was missing. From my XTS experience, it's usually a calibration/conditioning issue. That's when I realized that the "Unknown Batteries" aren't conditioning, nor will they initiate even doing it manually.

Has anyone else had an awful battery experience with these new radios? Sometimes I think the IMPRESS batteries are too smart and lead to more headaches.

If your programmer set the battery type in CPS to UL and you use a non-UL battery you will get that error, it's to prevent mixing and matching non-certified batteries. You need to use gray labeled UL/TIA4950 batteries with the 8000XE in this case. Also, were all the new 'unknown batteries' properly initialized prior to being placed in service? What is the firmware on your chargers? Anything lower than 3.4 should never touch an APX battery of any vintage.

Motorola has had several issues with batteries lately. Make sure the switch on the bottom is set correctly (If you have one).