IWCE: RELM plans small, lightweight Class A radio
LAS VEGAS–RELM Wireless plans to introduce this summer the “smallest, lightest Class A spec” radio on the market, said Dave Storey, the company’s president, in an interview with MRT. The radio will be marketed under RELM’s BK Radio brand.
“There are smaller products out there, but none that are truly Class A spec,” Storey said.
Form factor is a point of emphasis with RELM, Storey said, and will continue to be going forward. “Our future goal is to reduce the size of our portables,” he said.
The new radio will be available in UHF and VHF versions initially, but RELM is planning 700 MHz and 800 MHz versions as well, Storey said, adding that the radios will have enough memory capacity to operate in a Project 25 trunking system and will be upgradeable. RELM, which already supplies BK Radio products to the National Forestry Service, plans to target the radios to “all of the D.C. agencies,” Storey said, including the Department of Defense, Army, Navy, SPAWAR and the Transportation Security Administration.
The new radios follow the introduction in December 2006 of RELM’s Rapid Deployment Portable Repeater, a waterproof, standalone, suitcase-sized device that operates on battery or solar power, is simple to operate, and which provides analog, digital or mixed-mode communications. “You can drop these boxes into key parts of a decimated area and cobble together a communications system very quickly, Storey said.
More recently, the company achieved another win when it received a Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 validation for its BK Radio DPH 5102x digital portable radio. The validation, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), certifies that the radio’s cryptographic module meets federal standards for secure encryption. The radio also complies with the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials’ Project 25 digital communications standard.
