icom1020 wrote:
The crews hate the Kenwood handhelds, audio, not as durable. I know of a few who purchased HT and MTS for their own use. I just saw a video of the Ritron Clean Cab which can be upgraded to digital. They dropped it twice and then threw it out of the locomotive and fired it back up. Metal case.
http://www.ritron.com/prod_rccr.htmlA lot of people I have talked to LIKE the TK2180's, and TK-290's. (the UP, and PNWR are both customers of the Kenwood shop I work for) Sure you will get some that did prefer Motorola. Now I will agree in most cases the Motorola units are more durable. I own both Motorola, and Kenwood (I have tried the Icom P25 radios and they are POS's!! The P25 TX audio was the worst of any P25 unit I have tested) the RX performance on my TK280, TK290, or TK5710 will always receive better than my XTS5000's, or 2500's. I use them all at sites with a high RF noise floor and the job for me. I'll be glad to put money on the RX sensitivity a TK2180, or TK290 vrs an HT1250, or Jedi. I'll even bring the service monitor.
The Ritron unit looks interesting, but I have never been a big fan of Ritron. We have a bunch of their call boxes that we maintain, as well as a logging company that has their whole fleet with low band Ritron units. They keep talking about their "tri-mode" units, and the competitors are only "dual mode", or need to be removed to be upgraded. I don't know about the Icom units, but the Kenwood NX700's that are getting installed into the Clean Cab chassis are "tri-mode" out of the box. Ritron defines "tri-mode" units as wide band, narrow band, and 6.25KHz NXDN. They NX700's can be flashed from the front mic jack, so tehy could have firmware upgrades done in the field with no problems, so I don't know why they are pushing that issue so hard. The P25 Icom units I have owned all were also flashed from the front panel but know that the Icom NXDN do require a daughter board to add the digital mode oif not factory installed.
Jim