P.S I must say, I cried a little when Fulton Co left smartzone for P25. Those were the days lol (as far listening is concerned). Good ol' analog audio but with digital freq switching. Now I use Fayette county for my smartzone kicks, until their inevitable switch.
Our old network (192C) was never Smartzone. Smartnet .89x, MTC3600 controllers. First analog simulcast system in the state, circa 1991. It was actually a "merger" from two separate Smartnet .89x systems, one in the north end, and one in the south. Prior to 192C, the "north" and "south" systems had to be patched from Centracomm IIs at night for FCPD who roamed the whole county back then.
Old system was pure analog, we did have Securenet capability and some radios had DES-XL. PLIB lines were active until 4 years ago...
Old system hardware comprised of mostly MSF5000s with some Quantars for our old North/South data system. Still have the Quantars. They're sitting idle on a tall building downtown. We had a Spectra-TAC comparator. It took up two and a half racks at the prime site.
You have email on the way.
I miss the unique "sound" of the comparator and the audio when the system was aligned. I don't miss getting called 2-3 times a week because mod comps needed to be done, some lazy guy from some unnamed shop who insisted it was "corona mass ejection" causing deafness on channel 5, the USCI boards in our old CEB that had minds of their own, the night when the entire 192C went off the air because of control channels of the "new" somehow causing an issue (we moved over a channel at a time from old to new), the complaints about "static" from our folks.
Animal services was the first agency we moved over. Did it on a weekend. The first they said "the radios sound muffled. But at least the static is gone". That was 12/15/15. Everyone else went 12/29-12/30/15. One of our techs who cared for 192C sent the final "idle" command to the MTC3600 on or around 1/2/2016. It was dismantled shortly thereafter. 192C 1991-2016 RIP.
