Horn speakers are great in large open, areas. Go to the Alewife TA Station in Cambridge, MA, and there's horn speakers in the atrium that look like they were ripped off a Thunderbolt. The clarity of announcements is excellent.

Jason is right. My first VCR was metal and repairable and cost me more than half a week's take home pay. The latest one barely cost an hour and a half's pay anf has damn near no metal in it.

That is the city hall, not a church. ...and it would maybe need to be larger so that the sound output would stay even with a siren mounted in the open. There has to be a lot of loss from being mounted where it is. What that siren is is a priceless bit of war memorabilia that ought to be in a museum...

Support can play a huge role too. I'm not partial to any company, but if the local Whelen dealer gives me a better maintenance deal, I'm in. In my field, I have chosen certain equipment manufacturers based on service and support alone. The various companies equipment was extremely comparable, but s...

Thaniks, soccerdude, what can you tell us about it? It looks like some early form of ATI in a steeple or something similar, although those speakers are used by other customers than ATI. Was it a siren, or one of those hokey sounding chime things that played "The Old Rugged Cross" once in a...

Well, anything before transistors were in wide circulation would have required a lot more maintenance, warm-up time for the tubes, etc. It would have been a bear to manage.

I didn't say $1,000 isn't a big difference, but I did say $1,000 isn't too big a gap to be bridged by an aggressive bidder. The flexibility of a public purchaser to take another bid above the lowest depends on the state you're talking about. Some laws allow for more flexibility, some less. As far as...

I'd like to add to the fact that Federal Signal has been known for kickbacks in the past. Say a fire chief pushed really hard for a system of T-bolt's back in the 80's: It wouldn't be uncommon for FS to say "Ok, since you did that we will throw in a few extra light bars or something at no cost...

I had an opinion before I posted the question, of course. I think it's name recognition. I don't think it's the sales reps, because that's not a big factor in public bids, and I don't believe Federal's reps are uniformly superior across the country. With ACA, I meant the new souped up T-128 T-135, n...

My question is, then, why do 2001s outsell T-128s and T-135s? There's a lower pitch option out there. Is Federal that much cheaper, or is name recognition that gets them where they are?