Aug 4, 2008 9:57 AM, By Donny Jackson

KANSAS CITY—Motorola today unveiled the APX 7000, a full-featured multiband portable P25 radio with integrated voice and data that comes in a hardened package and is designed to be user-friendly for public-safety users, according to company officials.

“When we spoke with customers some time ago, they asked us for three things: make it louder, make it easier to use and make it smaller,” Tom Quirke, senior director of global products and solutions for Motorola’s government and public-safety business, said during an interview with Urgent Communications. “We’ve put a check in the box for all of those, but we’ve added a lot more capability.”

Indeed, the APX 7000 represents Motorola’s first portable multiband offering. The radio’s ability to operate in 700 MHz, 800 MHz and VHF networks will give first responders a new level of interoperability, Quirke said.

“There are network ways to linking different organizations—we’ve got MotoBridge, for instance—and customers tell us they’re great,” Quirke said. “But, in some cases, it takes 10 to 15 minutes to set that bridge up, and the customers say, ‘That’s 10 to 15 minutes I don’t have. I like the control of having the radio perform an automatic scan or me turn a knob to connect to the people I need to speak to.’”

In addition to operating on different bands, the versatile APX 7000—as well as the APX 7500 mobile version also being announced this week—is P25 Phase 1-compliant and will be upgradeable to P25 Phase 2, he said. The radio also is backward compatible with Motorola’s SmartNet and SmartZone systems, making it an ideal choice for agencies with such networks that are seeking a smooth migration path to P25, Quirke said.

Using a P25 Phase 2-compliant, A&B half-rate vocoder capable of operating on 6.25 KHz channels and designed to suppress background noise, the APX 7000 provides 50% louder audio than Motorola’s XTS 5000 series with no distortion, Quirke said. This is possible because the two-sided radio—one geared for voice while the other geared for data—means there are two microphones and two speakers in the unit, providing greater audio sensitivity and clarity, he said.

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