What’s sufficient today might not meet your needs in the future. With technology rapidly advancing, innovative features for portable radios continue to arise. To keep up with the ever-changing critical communications environment, you need the flexibility to add or migrate to new technologies when required.
This blog is part of a series focusing on what you should consider when selecting a portable radio – you can find the other posts here.
Can your radio evolve if your needs change? To protect your people and your investment, it’s vital to choose portable radios that are designed to evolve and grow with your organization.
In this blog we’ll highlight some of the factors you should consider to ensure your portable radios are future-proof.
Open Standards
When you purchase a radio, you want it to give you options to work with other equipment and evolve when necessary. Open standards like P25 and DMR allow you to operate multi-vendor radio solutions with a choice of devices, infrastructure and applications that best meet your needs.
With the flexible and defined interfaces of open standards solutions you avoid the risk of being locked in by proprietary software and hardware or stranded investments.
Flexibility – Hardware Changes
Suppose you want to save costs initially, and purchase radios without a screen. But what if your organization grows and adds more working sites, or decides to partner with other organizations for communications? You would need more keys and a screen to select channels and use text messaging.
If this is the level of flexibility you need, choose radios that allow hardware customization so you can add the features you need without having to buy an entire new fleet of radios.
Flexibility – Software Upgrades and Fleet Management
Use OTAP with Tait EnableFleet
When radio settings need to be changed or updated, you don’t want operations to stop. For easy and efficient management of your radio fleet, choose a software solution that can configure and manage your radio fleet from a centralized location via Over The Air Programming (OTAP).
OTAP eliminates the need to send out a technician to program radios, or bringing radios in for reprogramming. This means you don’t have to shut down operations to allow technicians access to radios, and gives you the ability to apply updates when it suits you.
There are different bearer options for OTAP, so if you’re are after OTAP functionality, choose the OTAP option that works best for you.
Tait Future-Proof Radios
Tait portable radios are open standards-based, multimode devices with a range of options to future proof your investment.
The Tait TP3 is a highly customizable portable radio, allowing you to choose from a wide range of options to meet your requirements today, and easily add other features as your needs change over time. If, for instance, you want to change your orange radios with 4-key keypads to green 16- key keypads at any point, this is no problem. Your radio provider can easily and quickly change the TP3 cover and keypad at any point, ensuring you maximize the value and don’t waste your initial investment.
Tait EnableFleet permits you to configure and manage your entire fleet of mobile and portable radios from one central location. It gives you accurate fleet information, OTAP, automated updates and more to simplify radio fleet management and increase efficiency for your organization.
Download our Free Guide to Learn More
If you want more information on flexibility, future-proofing and other important factors to consider when choosing a portable radio, download our free Portable Radio Selection Guide.
