Batboard

I've spent quite some time learning "the competition" and its products. By the various names of GE, Ericsson/GE, Ericsson, Comm-Net/Ericsson, Comm-Net, and finally, M/A-Com. (Tyco/M/A-Com)

First...what does it tell you about a company that's changed hands five times in 15 years?

You don't sell your winners.

You DO sell your LOSERS.


I'm going to be really fair and honest about the relative quality of various radios I've had direct experiences with.

First, most of M/A-Com's EDACS trunking radio models are actually made by Japan Radio Corporation. JRC makes a GOOD
radio. The workmanship and quality of manufacturing are generally excellent. Though they're now pretty much obsolete,
the Rangr mobile radio and the M-PD and M-PA portable radios are about as well made as any radio ever has been, and their
performance is excellent as is their reliabilty.

But in later years, frankly it looks like the "name of the moment" company chose to ask for less in the way of quality
manufacturing from JRC...if JRC is even actually making some of the crap I've seen with the GE (whatever...) name on it.

A fundamental observation: I've never once felt any need or desire to modify a Motorola radio in order to improve its
performance in any respect. But I have a short list of "must do" tweaks for some M/A-Com radios which are often
needed in order to bring some specific characteristics of M/A-Com radios (like the speaker audio quality) up to
something resembling acceptable performance.

Specifics: The LPE-200 is a popular smaller sized radio. It has weak, usually tinny audio quality and is not capable of
being heard clearly in a noisy environment. The speaker is tiny and the radio just doesn't have much audio output,
and what quality there is in the audio output rapidly turns to crap as you max out the volume control.

The Jaguar 700P generally sounds quite tinny and often has a speaker rattle, as does the newer 7100 portable.
For both of these radios, I take the speakers out, apply electrical tape to the speaker cones, and reinstall them,
which makes for a substantial improvement in audio quality.

The best of any of these radios, even modified for better sound quality, doesn't come close to the audio quality
of an HT600, MT1000, or any Saber or any Astro radio.

I've had the chance to play around a little bit with some XTS5000s lately. I don't own one...yet...but I've been able
to check them out. These are seriously impressive radios. Their solidity and quality feel is remarkable, and their
audio quality is noteworthy, particularly on digital transmissions. I've been able to do side-by-side comparisons
between a M/A-Com 7100IP (modified for better audio) and an Astro Saber, and an XTS-5000, all tuned to the
same digital (P25) modulated signal, and the 7100IP lags FAR behind the nearly 10 year old Astro Saber in audio
quality, and the new XTS-5000 sounds noticeably better still than the Astro Saber.

I have other criticisms of the M/A-Com radios, but I'm not going to air an entire laundry list at this time,
particularly when I'm not quite sure where to start anyway.

M/A-Com DOES have some good ideas. Some are even good enough that Motorola should have thought of them
first. But overall, Motorola's radios are uniformly of better quality.

I think that possibly the main reason for this is simple: M/A-Com is more likely to find a suitable off-the-shelf
product and work with it. Motorola is more likely to have optimized parts custom made for them. Case in
point: the speakers in the portable radios. I'm SURE that M/A-Com uses stock item speakers from one or
another vendor like Foster, just as I'm sure that the speakers made for Motorola's portables (at least the
higher end Astro models) are custom designed and built only for this application.

The best single idea that M/A-Com offers: Their programming software: It supports EVERY model of radio
that they currently support, in ONE software package. And you can read from a low end radio and write it
directly to a high end radio of a different model and series. The software will automatically make adjustments
to ensure that it works. And you can read a full-featured codeplug out of the highest model radio they make,
and use it to directly program a much simpler radio with few features, and not have to do any of the editing
yourself. The software does it automatically but will advise you that you'll lose some functionality and will
detail it. But the type of radio the codeplug came from or is going to simply doesn't matter.

That's a SMART feature there. Motorola should have figured that one out a long time ago.

And, you don't need "special" software to change a radio's configuration. Changing most radios in terms
of their configuration (keypad, display, etc) is a built-in capability of the regular programming software's
radio maintenance program.


I observe that since M/A-Com took over, they have made some definite improvements to the build quality
of their radios compared to the earlier days. But they've got a long way to go if they really want to make
a radio that truly has the same level of quality as Motorola's been making all along.


Elroy

My opinion? Glad you asked.

I dont think Tyco/MaCom would have spent the money if they didn't see a jewel in the rough.

I hope they can get in gear and get heavy on the P25 trunking bandwagon. Lots more money to be made there than in propritary systems now days, interoperability is the new buzzword. The problem is politicians dont understand what interopibility means. We have a brand new propritary Smartzone omnilink mixed mode statewide system here in Indiana instead of a P25 trunked system. This leaves Ma-Com out as a radio vendor leaving only Motorola and EF Johnson.

On radio quality, My UHF M-RK outperforms or equal to any Motorola radio in my collection. ASIII, Saber, Systems Saber, HT1250, HT600, Visar, XTS3000, and HT1000.

Just my 2 cents here. I own (or have owned) just about every portable that Motorola has ever made that doesn't use rocks. I've also owned (or have owned) just about every portable that GE has made. I've got to tell you that hands down, the MPA/MPD line is the most rugged and durable radio I have ever seen (and yes, this includes the Saber "R" line). I have seen their quality lacking lately though. The LPE200 product was at the time their top of the line portable, comparable to the Astro Saber/XTS3000 of the day, but it doesn't come close in terms of quality to the Motorola offering. I guess you can't have the best of both worlds!

This is the sort of philosophical debate I usually stay away from, but for some reason today my normal good sense is failing me:

I've also handled (to varying degrees) virtually every mobile and portable radio M and GE (defining "GE" to be name-change-insenstive) made in the last 20 years. In my experience, both companies have come up with some superb models and both companies have come up with junk. While not having conducted any sort of scientific study, I suspect that the range of quality is about the same for both companies.

At the same time, dealing with GE was a dream, and dealing with M/A-Com isn't so bad, while dealing with Motorola is a nightmare. As often as not, the person you get on the phone in the desparate attempt to have your question answered knows less about the product than you do. Add to that the publication of incomplete firmware and software packages.

I have both an XTS5000 and an XTS2500 issued to me. The audio quality on digital is OK, once you've made some adjustments via software. However, for the most part these radios are used on analog channels, and the audio of the XTS portables can't compare with the audio from my Systems Sabers and MTS2000s.

The real problem with GE stuff today is that one cannot design a system around it with any confidence that it will be supported in the future, and finding techs who can work on Mastr IIIs (much less MP-As and Deltas and Rangrs) is, in the northeast U.S., just about impossible.

Now I retreat . . . .

I expect to soon get some hands-on experience with Mastr III base stations and repeaters. They LOOK pretty
straightforward. Having modular construction can only be a plus...if you have the extenders.

Electing to use GE as the "owner insensitive" term is a good approach. I'll adopt it.

I'd have to agree that, physically speaking, the die-cast housings of the M-PD and M-PA make them
by far the most CRUSH resistant radios anyone has likely ever seen, but they're NOT tops when
it comes to DROP resistance due to the fact that their PC board are screwed directly into those
rigid aluminum castings, thus ensuring maximum G load on the PC boards from impacts.

When it comes to drop resistance, I'd have to guess that many Motorola radios are better
than the M-PA or M-PD for that reason.

My impression of XTS5000 audio is that it's the best I've YET heard from any portable
two-way radio. Maybe some are different than others in this respect? Certainly there
is no doubt in my mind that I've never heard IMBE digital done better.

It's hard to imagine the LPE as being top of the line, EVER. I think LPE means Little
Piece of Excrement. I am NOT impressed and I've been hands-on with quite a few of them.

I certainly would not put an LPE in the same class with ANY Astro product, even though it is
a digital capable radio.

Elroy

I currently have XTS/XTL-5000's and P7100/M7100' s operating on a M/A-Com P25 trunk system. The infrastructure is solid--those MASTR III's are real workhorses. The problem is on the software side. M/A-Com obviously rushed into production to nail down some contracts. Standing up the system was a nightmare. Every couple of days there was a new software push. Even now, we are waiting to get updates and patches. At least they haven't come out with any versions lately the are not backward compatible--that was fun. Every site that was touched could only see other sites that had been touched.

Another example, they shipped all of our subscriber radios with half of the options we paid for. Since we got the subscribers before the system was operational, I guess they figured it was ok to ship them without P25 tunking capability.....oh, and only with DES encryption, even though the consoles we eventually got were only capable of AES...Sure, we got the options eventually, but it meant we had to touch every radio again in order to add those features.

Also, I have about 8 times as many Motorola products as M/A-Com. I get more calls about failing M/A-Coms than I do for Motorolas. I would guess about 3 M/A-Coms go down for each Motorola that has a problem. Not good.

I don't know who you talk to when you call Moto, but at least when I call, I get to talk to a tech. Maybe not the best tech, but a tech. M/A-Com asks for my name and number so they can call back if a tech wanders into the building. I had an issue a couple of months ago, finally got a tech late in the day (after leaving a message mid-morning). He took the shotgun approach (try this, try that, try something else), but didn't get anywhere. 5:00pm hit, and his response when I called back again was "I don't know, try somebody else tomorrow". Awesome.

I will say this for M/A-Com, their programming software is far simpler than Motorola CPS. One program does it all, no need to get software for an XTS, software for an XTL, then more software for an Astro Spectra or whatever. Plus the ease of setting up the equivalents of systems, personalities, and zones.

Motorola needed a wake-up call to remind them that while they are the biggest kid on the block, they are not the only kid on the block. Thanks to some actual competition from M/A-Com, EFJ, etc, Mother M is actually making some changes in the right direction. I hope that they learn from this and don't try to rest on their laurels like they were doing.

That was a nice set of comments!

The build quality of a P7100 in NO way compares to that of an XTS. It's not BAD, but it's not GREAT.

Definitely I agree on the software comments as well. Great ideas, lousy execution if they need to patch their
software a couple of times a week.

Generally it's a bad idea to use PAYING customers as your beta (or worse yet, alpha) testers.

At this moment I'm repairing a P7100IP that has the very interesting characteristic of being able to transmit
at full rated output power while the VCO is sweeping the full band and not in a lock condition. Nor does the radio
give any errors.

This means the radio is a high power sweep generator capable of denying service to any other radio in the area
unless its own intended signal can simply power through the interference.

I suspect the PLL chip has multiple failures or has entirely failed.

I placed an email to M/A-com tech support and had an engineer call my office within 20 minutes. He had never
heard of that particular failure mode before and thinks it's fascinating. He arranged for me to download the
proper manuals for this radio at no charge, so I'm hardly complaining about the service so far.

In general, I think the entire situation is ideal: M/A-Com is competition to be taken seriously by Motorola,
and of course M/A-Com takes Motorola VERY seriously. The entire industry can only benefit from a competitive
scenario like this. Motorola needed a big kick in the ass, and frankly, it was absolutely BIZARRE that the biggest
one came with Florida choosing Comm-Net (M/A-Com's predecessor who owned EDACS, etc), a small company that,
at the time, was inches away from having a garage sale and shutting down forever, as its owners had not been
able to secure funding. M/A-Com saw a diamond in the rough and bought it. And I think they've done more good
for the (former) GE radio business than any other owner since GE alone owned it. It's once again a viable alternative
to Motorola...just not as good an alternative in many respects.

I always wondered why Motorola didn't simply BUY OUT Comm-Net. The company was TINY, relatively speaking,
with essentially no manufacturing facilities of its own (it's all contracted out) and about 700 total employees at the time.

Elroy

Things have definitely gotten better with M/A-Com's P25 infrastructure software/networking as time has passed, but there is still room to improve the reliability of their subscriber equipment. Their NetSentries are no longer the site killers that they were.

However,
I have about 150 M7100's, I see about 1 per week.
I have around 1000 XTS-5k's, I see about 1 per month.
I have a handful of XTL-5k's, I have only seen one for service.
I don't mess with the service on too many P7100's, although I have heard several sob stories about them.

Between the mobiles and the portables, I would expect the portables to get beaten up more, yet the M-A/Com mobiles go down 20 times more than the Motorola portables.....

/\/\otorola wrote:What do you do for work? Where do you work?

Just a guess, but I'd almost be willing to say he's a radio technician.

mr.syntrx wrote:

/\/\otorola wrote:What do you do for work? Where do you work?

Just a guess, but I'd almost be willing to say he's a radio technician.

Hmm, good guess. Here's another clue: 380-400 MHz.....

5-sides wrote:

mr.syntrx wrote:

/\/\otorola wrote:What do you do for work? Where do you work?

Just a guess, but I'd almost be willing to say he's a radio technician.

Hmm, good guess. Here's another clue: 380-400 MHz.....

Even though I don't know you, I'll add one more: NoVA. Hmmm...

What shape has 5 sides?

a: Pentagon !!

Rayjk110 wrote:What shape has 5 sides?

a: Pentagon !!

You got me.

I am a tech, although not exclusively. I also do a lot of other stuff, as there is not enough work to justify a full-time tech. I also do not work exclusively for the Pentagon, although I do some jobs for them from time to time. I am somewhat of a Jack-of-all-trades when it comes to RF comms, but I am mindful of the rest of that saying--"Master of none."

My electronic background is both military and commercial--I did time with an MSS for a few years. Being able to use my military time towards a civil service pension vs the lack of any real retirement plan from the Moto shop made the jump a no-brainer.

But to keep this post vaguely in-line with the thread topic, I still like the reliability of Motorola radios. The old GE leftovers that M/A-Com still uses work well, but the "new technology" that they developed in Lynchburg (or farmed out to the lowest bidder) is not as dependable from what I have seen. Somehow when they don't realize that they need to update their keyloader program to work with the changes they made in the latest firmware for their radio, you just don't get a warm and fuzzy feeling.
Also, did you know that first-responder dispatchers generally like to have some type of headset available to them? M/A-Com apparently did not. They made no provisions to incorporate a headset into their MaestroIP consoles. I built a simple interface box to allow the dispatchers that I support to use a PTT headset, since M/A-Com did not have any interest in the concept. They seem to think that all dispatchers sit fixed behind a desk, all the time. They never get up to get a drink, or a report form, or anything like that. Nope, they just sit there for 8 hours straight.