Harris adds LTE capability to Unified Vehicle platform

Harris yesterday announced that the Harris Unified Vehicle platform, powered by Tait, will support LTE connectivity from major carriers by the end of this year, according to a company official.

Jeremy Elder, a product-line manager at Harris, said that the LTE functionality would be provided in a new accessory for TM9400 Project 25 and TM9300 DMR mobile radios, allowing LTE backhaul to support existing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity for authorized devices within the connectivity “bubble” around a vehicle, he said.

“Capability for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth has been shipping for awhile, but we’re now adding LTE capability,” Elder said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “That’s really going to make this a very powerful solution for public safety. Now, we’ll have a converged Project 25 in-vehicle mobile that also supports LMR and LTE.”

The Unified Vehicle platform supports a “compute-at-the-edge” capability that lets third-party developers build applications and integrate them into Unified Vehicle at the edge, Elder said. One potential example of this would be to record audio on the mobile device locally, he said.

Elder said that Harris is in the process of getting the new Unified Vehicle platform certified with major carriers in the U.S. by the end of 2018.

In addition, Harris announced a new software release for its XL series of portable radios that is designed to improve the user experience, Elder said.

“The software really provides ease-of-use improvements for the radio, allowing users of the radio to navigate the radio in a much simpler way,” he said. “We’ve heard from a lot of our users that, more and more, their radios are being configured with large volumes of zones and large volumes of groups and channels. We’ve certainly had support for those in the past, but we’ve now optimized the user interface in the XL to allow the users to navigate through all of that in a simpler way.”

Elder said that the new XL user interface is available immediately and will be implemented as a normal software upgrade, so there should be no extra costs for most existing customers of XL radios.

These new offerings can be viewed this week in the Harris booth (#1501) at the IACP show in Orlando.