Initially, the intent of the FCC was that when an agency or town/city went to a trunked system they were to relinquish their old VHF/UHF frequencies. (The old VHF/UHF “agency specific” bands [such as Fire, police, etc.] had become saturated and the FCC wanted to free up these VHF/UHF frequencies for new assignments.) But that was changed, possibly due to glitches in the trunking systems at the time… when trunking was new people were a bit leery of the dependability. When New Britain Fire first moved to trunking they were having issues with transmission losses. Since trunking uses computers to sort everything out, the firefighters became distrusting of the new system, stating “The computer ate my transmission” when they weren’t heard over their trunking system. It may have just been a case of not being familiar with the new equipment, a “learning curve” issue, corrected by additional training, or, there may have been some adjustments needed to the system, I don’t know… it’s what the New Britain Fire Captain in charge of radio comms related to me when I was looking for a pair of VHF high band frequencies for the Town of Farmington Fire Depts repeater they currently operate on. I got one of their old frequencies (154.19MHz) and paired it with a federal forestry frequency (159.42MHz). In any case, there was a reluctance to relinquish the old VHF/UHF repeater pairs. And some towns/cities wanted to repurpose these old repeater assignments for other departments that didn’t have radios or the funds to transition to the new trunking network. They instead wanted to use existing equipment pulled from the FD’s and PD’s.
