Motorola Solutions unveils all-band P25 radio with Wi-Fi connectivity

LAS VEGAS—Motorola Solutions today announced the APX 8000, a P25 portable radio that includes Wi-Fi connectivity, operates in all public-safety bands, and has an adaptive audio engine that automatically changes the voice-quality settings in the radio in a manner that works in the user’s current environment.

“First of all, it’s an all-band radio,” Tom Quirke, Motorola Solutions’ vice president of global marketing for government products, services and solutions, said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications . “Secondly, it’s going to have Wi-Fi on it. That’s going to be a lot of labor savings and cost savings for our fleet management of radios. Thirdly, it has much more enhanced audio than we’ve done before.

“And that’s all going to be in a smaller form factor than we have in our traditional APX line, and it’s going to be capable of collaborating with different types of devices, predominantly a public-safety LTE device—the LEX L10.”

The latest in the Motorola Solutions line of APX radios, the APX 8000 supports all modes of P25, SmartNet and SmartZone operations in the VHF, UHF and 700/800 MHz bands.

With the Wi-Fi connectivity, over-the-air software updates on the APX 8000 can be completed on designated Wi-Fi networks 30,000 times faster than they can at P25 data rates, according to a Motorola Solutions press release. This functionality can have noticeable real-world impact, according to Danny Sanchez, senior product market manager at Motorola Solutions.

“One of the most significant pain points our customer have is radio management,” Sanchez said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “[Los Angeles County] has 12,000 to 14,000 radios that they have to update. Today, that takes them about three staff years to complete. With Wi-Fi, the conservative estimate in our preliminary analysis is that can be done in five business days or so.

“That’s significant. Obviously, the police officers are very happy, because they don’t have to go drive to the shop as much—even critical updates can happen in the morning, while they are being briefed. From the citizens’ perspective, they’re happy, because the officer doesn’t have to be driving to the radio shop, which means they are not on patrol keeping the streets safe. And, from a radio-shop perspective, they’re happy, because they don’t have to do the tedious manual legwork that takes hundreds of staff hours.”

But perhaps the most important feature in the APX 8000 is its audio quality, Sanchez s said. Although the APX 8000 audio-quality capabilities are the same as in other APX radios, previous APX devices required a manual adjustment of the radios audio settings. With the APX 8000’s adaptive audio engine, those adjustments can be made automatically, Sanchez said.

“Voice communications is really the number-one app in an LMR environment,” Sanchez said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “The radio has a new adaptive audio engine that essentially takes all of the lessons learned over the last five years, and that’s been put into the brain of the radio’s audio processing, so that it can—on the fly—change the noise-suppression algorithms, including microphone boost, the speaker equalization, the actual noise-suppression intensity.

“All of these settings that today are extremely customizable and have allowed customers to experience tremendous audio quality on APX over the last five years have now been given an intelligent brain to change them all on the fly as needed, based on the users’ dynamic and ever-changing environment, so the audio quality is as clear and as intelligible as possible.”

Attendees at IWCE 2015 can see the APX 8000 in the Motorola Solutions booth during exhibit-hall hours on Wednesday and Thursday. The product is scheduled to be shipped in September, Sanchez said.