So much for spending thousands on multi-band radios with “interoperability” when in the end you’re just hot potatoe-ing county radios to incoming units
Yup. Interoperabilty is an attitude and practice, not a technical feature. Buying whizbang radios and calling it good doesn't work. Three critical layers have to be accomplished
before successful/smooth interop can even happen; politics, technical, training.
Political means you have to get up and go shake hands with your neighbor, set aside rank/pride/whathaveyou, and setup agreements and exchange info such as freqs, procedures etc.
Technical means you both have to have access to the technology to achieve this, and you have to transfer the knowledge from the political level down to your agency radio techs or get radio techs talking across agency lines (which is politics of its own). Then the radios have to get programmed and maintained.
Training means your officers need to know that there is more to their radio than Channel A1 Dispatch and A3 Traffic. They need to understand the bigger picture of switching their radios to Zone 4 Channel 2 to get to VTac14, and that there may be solid/shaky/temporary infrastructure on that channel that lets them talk to someone else. They need to understand it might have lots of static, not as clear as their daily dispatch traffic, it will take work and patience to communicate etc. AND they need to go into clear text. This is the most painful for LE typically. Each agency can have their own 10codes, disposition codes etc. and they need to speak in plain ol' english instead.
Good luck!