EF Johnson features expansion of Viking subscriber portfolio during IWCE 2014

LAS VEGAS—EF Johnson Technologies will announce a new P25 mobile radio, speaker microphones and the availability of P25 Phase II software as the latest enhancements to the company’s Viking subscriber portfolio during IWCE 2014 this week.

The new mobile is called the VM600, which is a single-band TDMA mobile that is capable of P25 Phase I and Phase II operations, according to Christian Barker, EF Johnson director of product management.

“The bottom line is that we needed a mobile to match our portable that we released last year, as well as the prior year,” Barker said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

Like all Viking subscriber products, the VM600 hardware supports P25 Phase II, and this capability can be activated via a software upgrade that has been available since January, Barker said.

In addition, the VM600 can be integrated into EF Johnson’s Armada fleet-management software, which has received plaudits from the marketplace for its unique approach, according to Barker.

“We don’t program individual radios; we program a template, and we link radios to the template,” he said. “So, if you need to make a change to the radio programming, you do it once in the template, and then all of the radios that are linked to that template—the next time they connect—automatically get the upgrade. It can be done over-the-air or we can do it over a USB connection, as well.”

EF Johnson also will showcase new speaker microphones for its Viking products, Barker said.

“We’re actually going to have the loudest speaker microphones in the industry,” he said. “And, since we do all of our noise cancelling in software, the speaker microphones that are connected to our radios, by default, will have that noise cancelling built into it. So, our customers don’t have to pay extra to get noise cancelling out of their speaker mic.”

Karthik Rangarajan, vice president of marketing and product development for EF Johnson Technologies, said the new speaker microphones will be demonstrated at Booth 4009 in the IWCE exhibit hall. In addition, the company will demonstrate the capabilities of its Atlas P25 system, he said.

“In the booth, we will be the only vendor with a fully operational, multi-site, trunked P25 deployment at the show,” Rangarajan said. “We will be showing live network demonstrations, including network-failure scenarios and self-healing capabilities of the Atlas distributed architecture.”