MotoTrbo system has been in place, in fact 2 more sites just went online in the last week or so. The analog LTR system will be slowly phased out as users are switched over to the new system.
I know, I work for a user on the system. We hadn't heard anything at all about it until about three weeks ago. In fact, they just let us go out and buy/activate about a dozen new radios on the LTR system back in January, and never said a word about shutting down the LTR system. We could have been slowly buying a few MOTOTrbo units here and there over the last few years (I'm told they will do analog trunking too). There was more than one angry owner/manager around here the last week or so.
If they stick to the last timeline I heard, between now and the end of April, we have to buy mobiles for 33 ambulances, two for dispatch (we use a mobile with tone remotes for that, with a backup) plus however many portables they decide to buy. As a minimum, we'd need about 15, but I've heard talk about buying one for every ambulance, plus a few spares, and pretty much every supervisor/manager has a take-home radio currently. Figure on about 40-45 of those on the high end. I don't know much about TRBO equipment, but having that big /\/\ on the front, and being current technology, it isn't usually cheap. Then, add in parts and labor it remove the old radios and install the new. We're also going to have to find the time to pull ambulances off the street (which isn't always easy) to do the installs, which may have to be spread over a couple of days. Then there's the recurring fees of using someone else's system, no idea what monthly mic fees are going to be, but multiply that times at least 33.
I wasn't the only one who suggested that coordinating and licensing a UHF repeater pair, plus a couple of UHF repeaters/feedline/antennas, and tower rental, would probably be cheaper in the long run, since all we'd really need to do is reprogram our current fleet of radios to the new fequencies.