By Donny Jackson

Tait Communications has announced the TP9900, a new rugged portable radio that is designed to let a user communicate on a P25 or DMR system operating in one of four frequency bands, according to an official with the company.

Tait Communications’ head of product marketing, Anthony Blyth said multiprotocol radios are not new to the LMR industry but noted that the TP9900 is “designed as a public-safety radio,” while some previous multiprotocol devices have been targeted more to an enterprise market.

“We’re doing this, because we’ve got customers driving us to do it—you’re seeing, as a trend in the industry, more and more DMR users,” Blyth said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “We’re seeing DMR make more of an entrance into public safety, but there are all the other [use cases, as well].

“Schools are a major user of DMR technology. At least in the US market, getting called out to school incidents is something we’re very aware of, and it’s a solution we want to try to help with. A police officer who is called out to a school incident can change to a school DMR channel—if they need to—is one of our primary use cases.”

Although the TP9900 is being announced today during IWCE 2024 in Orlando, production of the handset is scheduled to begin in May and commercial availability is expected during the middle of this year, according to Blyth.

In addition to supporting both P25 and DMR technologies, the TP9900 is designed to operate in four spectrum bands: VHF, UHF, 700/800 MHz and 900 MHz, according to Blyth.

Blyth said the flexibility of the TP9900 could be attractive to agencies that want handsets that can be adapted when users operate on different networks in the future.

“If you’re making an investment in a multiband P25 radio, if you were to choose one with DMR capability—even if you don’t need it now, but there might be some future use cases—that’s what I would recommend as a better investment, from a procurement point of view,” Blyth said.

Indeed, while the TP9900 is designed to support operations in multiple bands, this functionality is enabled via software, which adds to the flexibility for a user who may want a less-expensive option initially, according to Blyth.

“You can buy it as a single-band radio, if you want and enable bands later,” he said. “You can reprogram it, including via OTAP [over-the-air programming].

“Let’s say you roll it out as a VHF analog [device] today, but you do a system migration to UHF or 800 MHz in a few years. You don’t necessarily need to buy a dual-band or multiband software key to do that; you can just reprogram it. So, you just programme it today as a VHF radio and program it tomorrow as a UHF radio or whatever you want. If you’re only going to be using one band at a time in your daily operation, you don’t need a multiband software key.”