Laboratory Tough or Real Life Tough?

Can a Tait portable survive a 2.2-ton Jeep?

Taittough crush test thumbnailTait radios have a long history of being tough.

We recently released the new TP9400, a P25 portable radio built to withstand the toughest challenges public safety responders face. In fact, it’s the most robust radio we’ve ever made.

So, once the new portables had been through a grueling testing regime – both in-house and at an internationally recognized testing facility (to show how the TP9400 stacks up against Military Standards) we wanted to help answer the questions that really matter to people:

  •     Can this radio survive being smashed by a bowling ball?
  •     What happens if you launch it with a three-person catapult?
  •     Will it work after I run over it with my truck?

With these critical questions in mind, and a video camera in hand, we took the radio into the real world to conduct some radical new experiments. We dubbed these experiments the “Tait Tough” tests.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be posting each Tait Tough video here on the blog and sharing the stories behind the tests. We hope you have as much fun watching them as we did making them.

And if you can think of a new “Tait Tough” test just let us know – we’ll film the most popular suggestions and post them online.

TAIT TOUGH TEST 1: THE CRUSH TEST

This week’s video is the 2.2-ton Jeep crush test. We filmed this on a bright, sunny day, which actually made filming difficult due to the shadows that kept creeping into shot.

Originally, we planned to film the Jeep running over the radio in one take — it didn’t seem wise to try to crush the radio more than once. But try as we might, we just couldn’t seem to get it right; either the Jeep wouldn’t stop directly on top of the radio, or our shadows made the radio too hard to see.

In the end, we filmed seven different takes of the same radio being run over until we finally had the shot we were happy with.

The amazing part: even after having a massive 2.2-ton Jeep roll over the radio seven times, everything still worked. The buttons weren’t damaged, and the internal workings remained secure. We did note some minor damage on the back of the radio —the belt-clip got a bit scraped by the concrete — but this had no effect on radio performance.

This certainly wasn’t our most creative test (those will come later!), but it truly demonstrates the toughness and quality build of the Tait TP9400 portable radio.

Enjoy the video, and be sure to tell us your ideas for future Tait Tough tests in the comments below.

Comments

  1. […] time launching the TP9400 with a catapult, hitting it with a bowling ball, running it over with a jeep, and more. We were consistently surprised by how durable the radios turned out to be, so we knew we […]

  2. […] to hit the road We tied the TP9400 portable radio to the rear of the Jeep we used in the Crush Test. Then we gave it some gas and took off, leaving the radio to drag behind, bouncing, scraping and […]

  3. […] had a lot of fun over the past few weeks conducting experiments like running over the radio with a 2.2-ton jeep and smashing it with a bowling ball. But, alas, it can’t all be about having fun. Sometimes you […]

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