Motorola Solutions introduces P25 multiband radio with Wi-Fi, speaker mic designed for firefighters

While the APX 8000XE features a power speaker on the radio, most firefighters are expected to use it with a remote speaker mic during an incident. The APX XE500 RSM meets the same rugged standards as the APX 8000XE radio and includes a number of audio features, including noise suppression, an adaptive audio engine and wind-porting design, Sanchez said.

In total, the new speaker mic has five microphones, so a firefighter can experience a high level of audio quality, no matter where he or she mounts the device, Sanchez said.

“The reason for that is that every department wears it slightly differently—if you go across the country, you’ll see different takes on what the best practices are,” he said.

“In order to really address maximum flexibility and not force them to change how they mount the RSM—whether it’s on the left shoulder, the right shoulder, over the back to the left or over the back to the right—[Motorola Solutions included additional microphones]. Now, with five microphones, no matter how they wear it, there’s going to be a pair of microphones along all three dimensions, so we can always provide the best adaptive noise cancellation.”

Sanchez said the XE500 includes a channel selector on the control head of the speaker mic, which addresses a “shortcoming” cited by some customers of the original XE remote speaker mic when the radio was put under turnout gear.

“If there’s an emergency on the fire scene, everybody else jumps off to the next channel, and the folks that are going to handle the emergency stay on the channel that the emergency happened on,” Sanchez said. “Now, with the channel selector on the RSM, we can make that a much more seamless process for the rest of those firefighters that are not addressing that emergency.

“Before , they had to essentially dig in under their turnout gear and try to change the channel. Now, it’s all exposed on the XE500 RSM, so they can easily change the channel and proceed with the mission … all while meeting this extra ruggedness criteria of 500 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Motorola Solutions plans to showcase the APX 8000XE radio and the APX 500XE speaker mic at its Channel Partner Expo and at IWCE 2016, both of which will be conducted later this month in Las Vegas. The products are expected to begin shipping in June, Sanchez said.