"Motorola became interested in Pepro’s enclosures, and that opened up a whole new market in public safety communications equipment. The two-way radio OEM wanted a cabinet that could be adapted to the needs of different agencies, which varied from one to four bays. Since then, public safety communications needs have grown. Recently, Pepro designed a deployable radio site for Williamson County, TN, that featured a 26-foot trailer, 60-foot tower with a 15-foot needle, a 12.5 kw diesel generator with a 90-gallon fuel tank, and four bay shielded cabinets with Faraday cage enclosures.

From there, Pepro moved into mobile units with towers and then into remote sites for federal agencies like the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, along with the Department of Defense and a number of public safety agencies. 

Today, Pepro is still a family-owned business. It is run by Vic’s daughter and son, Kelly Lander, President; and Kevin Garmong, Vice President. They continue Pioneer’s tradition of engineering products based on their customers’ needs.

Pepro offers a selection of standard Shielded Enclosure Systems, Integrated Fixed Radio Sites, and Mobile Cell Towers. But its customers in the telecom, government, utility and transportation, military, and oil and gas industries seldom have “standard” needs. 

“We have some standard products on our website, but the majority of the products that we manufacture are driven by the particular needs of each customer,” Lander said. “We do whatever we can to make the customer happy and to meet those needs.”

Pepro can customize its enclosures and remote towers in many ways. Most requests have to do with the size of the structure, the number of bays, equipment racks and battery trays. For mobile towers, they customize the size of the trailer, the type of axles and wheels (such as ruggedized for military and off-road applications), height of the tower and capacity, the size of generator and fuel tank, the power and electrical layout, and the amount of HVAC (depending on the amount of equipment and heat load).

“There are a lot of equipment options to meet our customers’ unique communications needs, which dictates the solution that we will engineer for them,” Lander said. “They will want to provide service to the greatest number of people. They will want redundant systems. They’re trying to get the most bang for their buck, and we want to help them do that.”