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800 Mhz verses 400 Mhz systems
Hello everyone,
Our local county, Anderson County TN, is considering "upgrading" to a 800 Mhz trunking system county wide for all VFD's, EMS, SO and Rescue Squads to use. I was wondering if anyone has had any experience using these and what the pro's and con's are.
Let me tell you about the county, we are mostly rual and have a varity of landscape from flat area's to hils and deep valleys. We currently have 2 400 Mhz (453.025) repeaters up one to the North and one to the South of the county. This has decent coverage with several holes in it that portable can't use and the mobiles have problems sometimes working. We also have a couple of simplex (direct) channels we use... one being the repater output and the other a new narrow band freq. Not everyone can use that due to it being a narrow band license some of our "older" radios can transmit there but can only listen. With the prices of the Narrow Band radios we can only afford to replace a couple of radios a year if weare lucky. Yes we are a poor department... most of the time we are luck to cover the bills and truck repairs, let alone anything new.
From what I have read these sytem are about $4K a mobile radio and $3K a handheld plus $100 year per radio to be able to operate in the trunking system? Can only one enlighten me about this?
From what I guessing to out fit the 5 trucks, the rescue mule, both fire stations and the portable radios would cost us over $100 k. If so that would put us out of business... thats more than we take in donations and grants a year if we have a good year.
BTW not that I am NOT begging ( LOL ) Yes I am..... if anyone has some spare radios laying around we could use them if you want to donate or sell for a discounted price. We are lucky one of the communications company's in Knoxville helps VFD's out by programming our radios for FREE if we take them there. But we are hurting for radios that can do narrow band for everyone to to be able to communicate.
Thanks everyone for your input!
Moe AVFD 7247
I duped this in the tools of the pro's
Our local county, Anderson County TN, is considering "upgrading" to a 800 Mhz trunking system county wide for all VFD's, EMS, SO and Rescue Squads to use. I was wondering if anyone has had any experience using these and what the pro's and con's are.
Let me tell you about the county, we are mostly rual and have a varity of landscape from flat area's to hils and deep valleys. We currently have 2 400 Mhz (453.025) repeaters up one to the North and one to the South of the county. This has decent coverage with several holes in it that portable can't use and the mobiles have problems sometimes working. We also have a couple of simplex (direct) channels we use... one being the repater output and the other a new narrow band freq. Not everyone can use that due to it being a narrow band license some of our "older" radios can transmit there but can only listen. With the prices of the Narrow Band radios we can only afford to replace a couple of radios a year if weare lucky. Yes we are a poor department... most of the time we are luck to cover the bills and truck repairs, let alone anything new.
From what I have read these sytem are about $4K a mobile radio and $3K a handheld plus $100 year per radio to be able to operate in the trunking system? Can only one enlighten me about this?
From what I guessing to out fit the 5 trucks, the rescue mule, both fire stations and the portable radios would cost us over $100 k. If so that would put us out of business... thats more than we take in donations and grants a year if we have a good year.
BTW not that I am NOT begging ( LOL ) Yes I am..... if anyone has some spare radios laying around we could use them if you want to donate or sell for a discounted price. We are lucky one of the communications company's in Knoxville helps VFD's out by programming our radios for FREE if we take them there. But we are hurting for radios that can do narrow band for everyone to to be able to communicate.
Thanks everyone for your input!
Moe AVFD 7247
I duped this in the tools of the pro's
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Engineco913 on
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With the high band radio's if the county doesn't switch you all to 800mz I would think of installing another repeater to give middle coverage and hopefully pick up the dead spots. 800Mz is only as good as those fire departments that can afford them. They run anywhere shy of 5000 a pop for mobiles, and 4k a pop for portables. Installing another repeater to help buffer the 400Mz system could be split up (cost) between all the companies that use the system. (making it a much smaller bill per company) If I can suggest another cost effective measure with your portables, switch to Vertex Standard Portables. They run about $225 a piece (16 channel's) and can communicate back and forth or can be receive only. Fire departments around here are switching to these portables on the simple basis that they are less than half the cost of Motorola pagers, and can have a page channel installed in them. You can make these radio's Identifyable so you can track any abuse with radio key up's, or make the receive only so a non officer doesn't have the ability to talk over the air waves. Imagine how many vertex standards you can buy for the price of 1 portable 800mz?
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Permalink Reply by kevin gilstorff on
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hi my name is kevin i am from a small county here in michigan we had just went to the 800mhz program we had help from our state we got a 6 million dollar grant that helped us provide all the radios that all our depts needed from mobiles to portables and the station radios and the towers we needed we have 5 towers in our area the seem to work well know we had some bad area's but we added another tower which seemed to work know we have about 95 percent coverage and yes the mobiles r about 3600 hundred and portables r around 2000 i believe the mic fee was 200 per radio but we do not have to pay for that until like 2010 because we had that in our grant but they r better because they can reach farther than regular radio's do we can reach from one end of our state to the top end of state so they do pretty well need more get ahold of me
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