Service manual

Guide to ASTRO™ Digital Radios
Figure 1.3 Voice coder vs. channel condition evaluation. The evaluation of four 7.2 kbps speech coders by the Telecommunications Industry
Association (TIA) for the purpose of selecting a speech coder for the APCO Project 25 North American land mobile radio communication system
produced the above results. During this evaluation, the IMBE™ Vocoder outperformed all codecs in every category. (Source: DVSI)
Motorola Inc. engineers worked with DVSI to implement the IMBE™ codec into the ASTRO™
radio platform. In 1996, the first versions of host firmware which supported the IMBE™ codec were
made available along with Motorola Inc. FLASHport™ feature Q806/G806 (IMBE™/APCO-25 digital
operation).
Upgrading an ASTRO Digital Saber™ or ASTRO Digital Spectra™ for ACPO Project-25 compliancy
was as simple as ordering the update from Motorola Inc. and refreshing the radio’s host and DSP
firmware builds, and reconfiguring the codeplug to enable Q806/G806. New Radio Service Software
(RSS) was also required.
Another industry name for the APCO Project-25 IMBE™ codec is Common Air Interface (CAI).
Later in 1996, Motorola Inc. released a new portable radio—the XTS 3000™. The XTS 3000™ is
almost electronically identical to the ASTRO Digital Saber™, with the exception that it has a four line
display, and has separate vocoder (Voice-coder/decoder) and controller PC boards, whereas the ASTRO
Digital Saber™ and ASTRO Digital Spectra™ share a common vocon (Vocoder-controller) board. Model-
specific details are discussed later in this guide.
The second-generation ASTRO® products debuted in 2002. They are referred to as ASTRO25™
radios. These include the MT 1500™, PR 1500™, XTS 1500™, XTS 2500/2500RB™, XTS 4000™, XTS 5000™,
SSE 5000™, XTL 1500/1500RB™, XTL 2500/2500RB™ and XTL 5000™ models. ASTRO25™ series radios
offer a dual-core CPU, expanded flash memory and full APCO-16/APCO-25 simultaneous support. More
specific details are discussed later in this guide.