Batboard

So, whats your opinion on Motorola sirens? (mainly astro spectra/ spectra sirens)

likes/dislikes compared to other American sirens?

They look good espeially with a o5 head or an XTL2500 but they are not the loadest on the market.
Also the Motorola speakers are so old fasioned compared to the flat drivers now available.
We still order the sirens but get our speakers elsewhere

We have the sys9000 in our squads. I personally don't care for them. Tones sound okay,not great though. But, they need to get with the present. Get rid of Hi/lo and replace it with piercer/phazer/whatever and update some of the other functions. I don't like that the manual is basically worthless other than to hit it when you want the siren off and it winds down rather than just off with the siren button. Enable it to be used as a manual, siren blast and if held down, it winds up and holds. The Whelen 295s at my previous agency did this. It sure helped in conjested intersections to flip it over to manual and hold that puppy at high pitch. I really liked the 295s', but gotta use what they dump in the cars.

Motorola are a max of 130 watts where as Federal are 200 watts

But, the Moto PA absolutely spanks anything else on the market. It's nice having to turn the PA volume down due to feedback when you're inside the car with the windows rolled up.

I'll sacrifice something I rarely use (PA) for more functions of another model.

The one time I had to use the PA of a Sys9000 for a Felony stop, the dumb thing wouldn't stop squealling no matter how much I turned it down......... I ended up throwing the mic on the seat and yelling.

i have installed 2 of them with the spectra 9000

they are nice due to the simple wiring and so forth . and you can program out the siren sounds

I'll have to agree with an earlier post that an intersection/phaser/piercer type setting would be nice, but otherwise, personally, I think that Motorola's tones sound better than most other manufacturers tones do, especially the air horn. I really like the fact that all controls can be put on the control head (depending on the control head in question) of the radio, and you don't have a large driver or separate control head for the siren taking up real estate in your vehicle.

Depending on the type of setup you have, you can get by with 2 "remote" mount control heads, one for your radio (Spectra, Kenwood 30 or 90 series...) and one head for you lights/siren/arrow (Smart Siren, CenCom, RLS, HHS2100...). There are options out there.

The thing with the Spectra radio and siren controls in one head is you don't have airhorn, we had one of those heads in an old car. If you have the Spectra radio and siren heads separate, the you're still down a lighting control and possibly an arrow control.

In my POV, I have a Kenwood 730/830 dual band with one control head and a Whelen HHS2100, along with the Sho-me sub-mini 6 lamp arrow control. This hardly takes up any realestate on my dash/console area.

rwo978 wrote:The thing with the Spectra radio and siren controls in one head is you don't have airhorn, we had one of those heads in an old car.

Huh? You can program the air horn to a button on the control head, or hook up an external button or the horn ring to activate it. If the one in ya'lls old car didn't have one, it simply wasn't programmed that way.

Figured as much.

Install joint just put a VisionHawk in a new car 2 weeks ago.......... and it hasn't worked since they put it in. And, the car came back with the HAWS not working.

Is there a way to externally program the siren head that is separate of the radio head? Or does it have to be hooked up to a computer?

I'd like to mess around with the manual tonight at work and try to get it to a true, momentary manual. However, obviously, I don't have the programming computer...

it uses the S9600 bus which origiates in the radio programming not the siren control

To expand on what Bruce just said, the Systems9000 siren box has to be hooked to a radio to function, even with the DEK (what you're calling a "siren head separate of the radio head"). The DEK doesn't, so to speak, contain any programming. You would have to hook the radio to a computer via a RIB, and use the proper RSS to tell the radio which DEK button you want to do what. Off hand, I'm guessing that there is a "Manual" button on the DEK, but it is set in the codeplug for "Wail", instead of "Air Horn". You should be able to press the manual button while the siren is in "Yelp" and hear the air horn. All of these things can be changed via the RSS.

the maratrac siren can be used as stand alone

A number of years ago I used an old Syntor X PA/siren in my old Cadillac (with the Syntor X radio installed for other purposes, of course) as a form of car alarm. It was set up so that it could go off in a siren mode (I think I selected wail) if any door opened without disabling it via the "magic button" first.

I hand-selected from over a dozen available Atlas Soundolier speakers for the very loudest one, measured by my Radio Shack sound level meter.

And then I hand-selected for the PA amp that pushed it to the loudest level, too.

Dear God, what a noise! I've NEVER heard a louder siren in a vehicle! I think it it was overloading the sound level meter! One single blast, one second long,
with you standing in front of the car and your ears would clamp down and then ring for at least fifteen minutes.

To make it more fun, if I ever left my car in a parking lot in a place that I wasn't really comfortable, I'd set the radio to External Radio mode on a private,
DPL-protected channel that was programmed into my Saber. Once I did this when I was in West Palm Beach, as I went into a grocery store to get something
for lunch, and when I came out...whaddaya know...there are some "undesirables" SITTING ON THE HOOD OF MY CADILLAC. I guess they felt at home on a Caddy
or something....

So I switched my Saber to the ALARM channel, held it up, keyed it, and stated in a loud, clear voice, "STEP AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE."

The people who were sitting on my car jumped a couple of feet, took off, and ran like they were on fire. And I got a good laugh out of it.

The car was a full hundred yards from where I was standing and I STILL got feedback from the siren speaker to the Saber mic.

Fortunately, that was the only time the alarm was ever actually used except for testing purposes.


Elroy

I spent 23 years working for a govt agency that bought Motorola Syntor X's, Syntor 9000, Spectras, and now Astro Spectras, all sight unseen and all with "built-in Motorola siren packages and large 100W Atlas speakers designed to mount vertically in the grille of a 1954 Packard. Of course, the Packard model never fit in the grille of a late model Ford Taurus or anything else so the radio installers contracted locally would usually try to get by with shoddy speaker set-up (projector removed/basic speaker and cone only usually mounted under a bumper or in a wheel well. It was usually OK to blast a pedestrian out of a crosswalk in NYC but when engaged in emergency operation, you couldn't hear the damn thing 50' in front of the car. Then, of course, the speaker cones would fill with water and the siren amp would short out giving you funky "Fail" codes on the system 9000 display).

RYAN - with regard to the manual sound, what we did in NY to make it more mainstream was to have our tech's program the Manual sound as "Yelp." While the only way to initiate a manual sound is by engaging the manual button and pressing the horn ring (That model always needed a Vehicle Interface Plug/"VIP" and a horn/siren connection), you only had once choice (manual siren as you described, yelp or air horn) and it needed to be in the control head program).

PS- Those of us who cared went out and bought a CPI, Whelen or Federal speaker made to easily mount in the grille of the vehicle it was designed for.