Okay, after doing some testing and research within rankin county's dispatch system I have figured something out. The VHF channel that is listed as a "fire paging" channel in the database is sorta true sorta not. One of 5 dispatch consoles rankin county sheriffs office has actually is set up with that channel added on the transmit when they go to talk on the 800mhz county fire anything the dispatcher says also goes to the VHF but you will not hear any units just replies to the units from dispatch. After about a week of listening I would not say it would be the first thing to listen to if you want to hear what's going on. Being only one console has it its just luck of the day that maybe the fire dispatcher is sitting at that one console but I've noticed in a week of a radio programmed to that channel only 2 nights have I heard anything while my 800mhz would be going crazy with traffic. Also if it's busy and a second dispatcher is assisting in fire and the primary fire dispatcher is actually on the console programmed to tx on the VHF also you wouldn't hear what they are saying due to them not being on that console. We no longer use minitor pagers as of years ago because the barrow banding mandate the county decided the alpha numeric pagers were cheaper than a whole new fleet of minitors and new everything else. My best guess is that being most all fire departments around rankin have a VHF mobile radio plugged into the wall using a converter in the chiefs office and 80% of all the fire trucks in rankin still have the old VHF radios from when they were retired 20 years ago, we just keep moving them up every time we get a new truck and install them in it so I figure being the channels have been the same forever it seems like that county fire on the VHF radios can be used as a backup if system failure. It's the same channel as the VHF 154.0100 page out is on the database. With rankin county under supplying volunteers in MSWIN radios I'll soon be having a talk to see if maybe when MSWIN system is implemented that maybe we install the VHF radio channel on all of them so we can hear the nature of the call vs the crappy alerts on the text pagers. I'll keep everyone updated on that but figured I would let everyone know on some information regarding that channel.