At what point do obsolete or untilized entries get deleted?
For example Harrisonburg City / Rockinham County (Virginia) moved to a new ProVoice system last year and the primary Police and primary Sheriff freqs are still in the conventional listing.
Do they remain as long as a license is valid? And if so, should (could) there be a field in the database to indicate its no longer in use?
???
I think typically when somebody can verify that those entries are obsolete. The reason they are often left intact is because you never know when that agency that just moved to a trunked system will need to use their old system as a backup system. We see this happen with new systems all the time. A new trunked system comes online. Agencies move to it. They then determine that they can't effectively communicate without some changes to the trunked system being made - so they revert back to using their old conventional systems and then migrate back on to the trunked system when things are fixed.
Many agencies continue to retain their backup / old radios and frequencies just in case. So unless there is a good way to verify that a radio system is no longer in use, it is better to leave it in the DB with a note to indicate that it may be used secondarily / as a backup / or may not be in use any longer.
For instance, my county has a low-band frequency used by the Sheriff. the Sheriff's Dept uses their low band at least 50% of the time even though their primary presence is supposedly on the trunked system. To add to that, their license has been expired for some time. So, it's not wise to simply delete an entry simply because the license is expired - since that is not a good indicator of whether or not it's still being used.
If you know for a fact that an agency is predominantly using a new system, or if you know for a fact that an agency has rid themselves of all radio equipment to operate on their old frequencies, you could submit and update indicating that the agency abandoned the old freqs or that the agency is now primarily on the new trunked system. I am sure that if you do that, your state / county admin would look into it.
Mike