Relm Wireless advances B&I product lines
Relm Wireless, West Melbourne, FL, might be the poster child for a company in transition — or a company about to complete one.
During the past several years, the company has transitioned from a mini-conglomerate named Adage. The companies that made up Adage were divested or dissolved and folded into the public entity of Relm. The company has become a focused land mobile radio equipment manufacturer. Relm offers two-way radio equipment under the brand names of RELM, Uniden PRC and BK Radio.
Relm’s president, David Storey, said that the company’s strategy begins with the use of the Total Quality System to manage quality. The strategy also relies on customer contact to achieve satisfaction with its products and keys product development to profit margins adequate for long-term success.
During the transition, Relm bridged a lack of current business and industrial radio product development by acquiring the more modern Uniden Private Radio Communication product line. Relm also has updated the Uniden enhanced subaudible signaling (ESAS) FM trunking product, adding UHF capability to fit the niche market of UHF trunking.
The basic ESAS switch costs less than $25,000 and controls as many as 20 channels. Even when used to control only five channels, an ESAS system “costs about half as much as Brand X,” said Thom Morrow, Relm’s senior vice president of sales and marketing. The same switch can be used to control crossband use of 800MHz and UHF channels.
Ken Klyberg, product manager, said that Relm had completed ultisite dispatch system features that Uniden had begun to develop. The company is supplying firmware ESAS upgrades for Uniden mobiles and portables to allow wide-area dispatch, seamless roaming and unique IDs.
In favor of developing its own Project 25 product, Relm abandoned two previous development paths involving OEM agreements with Motorola and Racal. One reason was that the OEM units would have had a different man-machine interface than Relm’s current BK Radio public safety products. Another was the reality of insufficient margins.
Storey said that a rights offering through Noble Financial Group, Boca Raton, FL, was expected to bring Relm a capital infusion between $2 million to $3 million during March to speed the company’s digital radio development.
Finding firefighters in forests
Relm has developed a simple “locator” accessory that plugs into BK Radio portables and mobiles. The locator uses GPS, but Morrow said it won’t be called a GPS unit because people expect GPS units to have built-in map displays. Instead, the locator accessory sends location information over a mobile portable to any other unit, base, mobile or portable, connected with a laptop or other computer to track locations.
“For a fire or SWAT team, if there’s someone with a laptop, a portable and the locator unit, you’re in business. You could put it in a command or dispatch center. It’s easy to use and doesn’t take hours of training,” Morrow said.
Using outsource manufacturing of its radio cores and in-house finish work, Relm has improved its cost control and returned to profitability in 2001. Storey said that with about 70% of its sales going to the public safety segment, Relm expects to grow that market as the industry’s “third manufacturer of a portable and second manufacturer of a mobile.” And with a schedule to introduce new business and industrial product that Storey described as “aggressive,” he expects Relm to increase that side of the business, too.