Exactly. What people might not understand is the fact that many of the regional systems the UC PDs have moved to maintain caches of rental radios that can be made available to outside mutual aid agencies. For large events (with a lot of prior planning), San Diego County Sheriff's Dept has a large cache of portables that can be loaned out, and the event can be run on any number of pre-coordinated mutual aid talkgroups. I would imagine the case would be similar for UC officers responding up to UCSC? Or do you guys keep your own cache of portables in house?
Yeah, we can buy a few analog VHF radios for the price of one high end P25. As radios get upgraded at the PD, the old ones that are in good shape usually get a trip to the shop then put into cache. Since we are using analog VHF, this makes it pretty handy. Also, since all the local agencies are VHF analog, they all have spare radios. Getting extra VHF radios is not an issue. Our PD is getting ready to purchase all new VHF gear, so that will mean even more spares/cache radios.
I have about 8 800MHz trunked radios in my cache that can be loaned/rented out as needed. Most larger departments have a few spares also. In a true emergency there are radio users that won't be involved, that frees up there gear. In reality, most people that would truly be involved in any sort of disaster already have the radios they need. Also, in a true emergency, radios are handy, but they are just another tool. On it's own, a radio isn't going to fix anything, it just makes fixing things a bit easier.
We can also patch VHF and 800 at the console. On 800, it can either be the trunked system or the analog/conventional back up repeater.
Interoperability doesn't automatically mean it has to be P25. All the 800MHz gear we have, be it P25 or NexEdge, or even the old SmartNet MTS2000's all do analog. A simple analog repeater solves a number of issues and does it cheap.