Mobile Relay Associates (MRA) has entered into a long-term agreement with Pupil Transportation Cooperative to provide its NEXEDGE Two-Way Radio Repeater Digital Network with voice, data and GPS capabilities in support of 148 Kenwood NEXEDGE radios.

Pupil Transportation Cooperative provides service to Los Angeles Unified School District.  Since MRA’s Kenwood NEXEDGE Digital Network covers Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties, the system will allow Pupil Transportation Cooperative to use the buses for special events that go outside of Los Angeles County while still maintaining communications using the Kenwood digital network.   

The radios will be installed in Pupil Transportation Cooperative’s fleet of vehicles in December when students are on winter break. The system was chosen because of the network’s superior coverage, ease of use and features.  The Kenwood Digital Network utilizes a digital IP infrastructure of links to connect all the tower sites together into a seamless network.

“Gone are the days when our customers must manually switch their radios to find a tower site from which they can obtain a usable signal and then hope that the receiving party is monitoring the same tower site,” said Mark Abrams, system engineer and MRA partner. 

The radios will seek out and locate a usable tower site on their own, register the unit on the tower site to inform the network where it can be found, and connect all tower sites together that have a unit registered from the group any time that a dispatch is made over the network.  Moreover, Kenwood’s NXDN air interface provides approximately 10-14db better performance for each radio, resulting in 20 percent better range than the equivalent analog system of similar design, according to MRA.

Another feature that is built into the system at no additional cost is digital encryption with 16 selectable encryption keys that have 32,000 variants to provide security. The digital radio automatically routes all data so that it is not audible by the radio user. The NEXEDGE radio can send GPS, status, text and long data messages without the end user ever hearing any of the data.
 
Pyramid Communications will provide the GPS/AVL solution with its Street Smarts software for the fleet.  Pupil Transportation Cooperative will have all of the data in-house over the MRA Digital Network. MRA’s system will provide automatic long-term storage of the GPS information and instant GPS location information.
 
For more information about MRA and its NEXEDGE Two-Way Radio Repeater Digital Network, visit www.mra-raycom.com.