I'm in FL. Adding hurricane ratings to the requirements for new buildings makes them a tougher RF challenge, too.
Now add that to a hospital build spec. It's almost enough to make you want to give up on the radio business.
That reminds me of when I spent DAYS chasing my tail over an Icom IDAS digital system we installed in a hospital, and we had good signal strength but we got a certain percentage of dropped calls. My boss was sure it was an interference issue. I had other suspicions.
Because we'd had the same issue with other IDAS systems we'd put in, all according to "The Book".
Some time later it turned out that Kenwood's engineers found the glitch in Icom's firmware in that (first generation idas) series of radios....a single bit error right there in the part of the firmware that decodes the idas codec.
That was exactly what I had suspected. But couldn't prove.
Kenwood radios worked perfecty in the same system. The first gen Icom radios would always drop a few calls every day.
That experience pretty much convinced me that I want no part of radio systems that aren't provided by Motorola or Harris.
The "second tier" manufacturers just don't put the time and effort into comprehensively testing a new digital format before releasing it on unsuspecting dealers who will then unwittingly use their customer's systems for field testing that should have already been done.
