APCO exhibitor Vertex Standard offers free demonstration radio, sees ‘regeneration of interest’ in radio communications post-Sept. 11.
At its booth at the APCO national conference in Nashville, Tenn., Vertex Standard was showing its new series of high-performance, high-specification mobiles that Scott Henderson, vice president of the company’s land mobile division, said were easy to use.
“Vertex Standard is making a major push into public safety market. We introduced these VX 4000 and VX 6000 mobiles for VHF lowband, VHF highband and UHF. We also introduced new state-of-the-art portables with from 48 to 512 channels, the VX 600 and VX 900 series,” he said.
“Plus, we are now offering a free demonstration radio to qualified public safety agencies. That program has been going really well. Since we advertised it in the magazines, we’ve been averaging 10 leads per day,” Henderson said.
Part of Cypress, Calif.-based Vertex Standard’s effort has been to reintroduce itself to the public safety marketplace since changing its name from Yaesu Electronics. Henderson said that many in the public safety community remember the company for its amateur radios, which still carry the Yaesu brand name. The company’s marine radios carry the Standard Horizon brand, and Vertex Standard is the brand applied to its land mobile and airband radios.
Henderson said that Vertex Standard customers come from the company’s dealer base and public safety agencies, including “new customers who have not experienced our product and seem to be surprised at the products and features that we offer for the price.”
He said that the company is competitive on price because it is a Japanese manufacturer and one of the last true manufacturers left in the business, with factories that only produce the company’s own products.
Henderson said that he was pleased with the APCO exhibition.
“The wine and cheese served on Monday night brought people in for good, quality time. We’ve had some good, exclusive hours with the attendees and developed some interesting leads,” he said.
“We can talk about what happened on Sept. 11, but for one thing people are becoming more aware of their personal security and of their community’s security, and as a result radios are becoming more important. The overall market was flat for many years, and now there’s a regeneration of the thought that radio offers dependable communications that’s always there. We know it wasn’t there on Sept. 11 for cellular. But radio is always there. Radio is so dependable that people are regenerating an interest in radio communications,” Henderson said.
