Vendor visit
We head to where base station
components are serviced. We see
a well-kept desk complete with soldering
iron and RF test equipment – ‘from
Rohde & Schwarz, ofcourse’
A staging area for
factory acceptance
testing
He explains that as the subject matter requires a great deal
of explanation, the groups of trainees are typically no more
than six to eight in size.
Protecting investments
We then move into a much noisier room, where all the
systems that are used during the training programmes are
kept. ere is a wide variety of systems both in terms of
technology (DMR and TETRA) and age. Speaking of the
latter, Oltmanns shows us a DIB-500 R4 base station that
was introduced in 2007 and is still in use. He explains that
Hytera Mobilfunk still keeps it available for customers who
have deployed it in their networks, and that this is part of
the company’s strategy of working to protect its customers’
investments in its equipment for as long as possible, while
oering its new DIB-R5 base station family for new
installations and projects.
e next stop on our tour is a staging area where the
company facilitates factory acceptance tests – it houses
systems that have already been sold and congured for their
new owners. ey are tted with dummy loads, which
prevent possible damage to the base stations’ ampliers by
converting the bulk of the RF power into heat.
We then move into the company’s warehouse, which
stocks all of Hytera’s products. Oltmanns explains that
handsets are shipped in from Hytera’s factories and then
are tailored to customers’ needs – equipping them with
additional batteries if needed and the correct antennas for
the frequencies they will use.
He adds that for sales outside Germany, Hytera
Mobilfunk always works with distributors such as RTcom in
Poland and Advantec in Italy. He says Hytera Mobilfunk’s
headquarters sells a modest number of handsets – around
100,000 a year.
e rst thing it did when it received its rst shipment
of Hytera’s new PNC370 PTT over Cellular handsets
was to issue them to its sales team to allow them to
easily communicate with each other as well as showing
them to end-customers. e HQ did use wireless DECT
telephones for internal communication, but has switched to
IPtelephony.
We head to the area where base station components are
serviced and repaired. Oltmanns explains that typically
clients keep these, such as carrier cassettes, on site and,
if they fail, swap them out for a fresh one and then send
the failed component to the company for repair. We see a
well-kept desk complete with soldering iron and RF test
and measurement equipment – “from Rohde & Schwarz,
ofcourse”.
Waste not
We move through the oces that handle purchasing,
logistics and servicing for handsets. “We also sell spare
parts for Hytera radios to our certied service partners,”
Oltmanns says, before noting that the value of handsets
makes it important to ensure they can be repaired, for
example if a volume or channel selection knob is damaged
after a radio is dropped on the oor. He adds that in some
regions where the air is humid and salty, keypads tend “to
rub o”, requiring their replacement once every two years
or so, “and there’s no point in replacing the whole thing just
for a keypad”.
January 2019 @CritCommsToday 29