Apologies for the absence
As the comm guy in my volunteer dept, I have a dept issued HYT portable 5watt VHF and a SLERS Harris P7200 radio. As of now, Okaloosa EMS/FD dispatch has a painful process to set off pager tones. I will get to their painful process shortly. As of now, VHF and SLERS are fully 100% patched on both north and south fire channels. So, at any time, there may be 3 trunks used at one time for simultaneous calls on north and south including the EMS SLERS channel. County has asked us in the field to utilize the SLERS at times to talk back to dispatch and listen. The muffled sound is the digital SLERS to analog conversion in the console, it has nothing to do with the radios themselves.
The bad thing, and I mean a really bad thing is this: To page on south or north fire, the patch has to be broken for tones and initial call info on VHF only. Then the patch has to be put back in place after tones. Otherwise, as some have heard, the tones get abruptly cut off. This also means that I cannot go into Walmart for example with the SLERS and hear the call given out. If out of my vehicle, to receive initial info and tones I must have the VHF portable with me. Otherwise I just have to wait until I hear units responding and dispatch repeating the info.
So, if multiple calls are being paged for back to back, one might as well put the SLERS down because dispatch will page calls and listen to VHF only for the first few seconds after every page or just not patch for many minutes if that many pages needed in a short time(it is going to be interesting when the summer structure fire overload comes in...you know, when the north county gets 10 or more calls in an hour due to lightning strikes with multiple districts). The agreement is for full patch until at least 2011. So, during light call volume, 800 can be used but when it gets heavy, patching just takes too long to keep doing and undoing.
Wise871,
Walton County FR north is a simulcast VHF/800. One can talk to dispatch at Walton via VHF or 800. But only dispatch can hear both. If one talks on VHF the 800 will not hear that part of the convo and vice versa. Santa Rosa is still fully VHF with no public plans for anything else. As you saw on Florosa's truck, that is the same all over the county. We have to have both VHF and 800 capability in our hands.