And after the towns people pay for this elaborate system, in will come the next form of communication
Cellular Radio!!!
Up here on Knox Ridge there is a cell tower. They tore down a really cute farm house many years back, erected a big old ugly cell tower. Nothing got put up there for 10 years or so. All of a sudden we see AT&T trucks sitting up there one day. A set of antennas show up at the top of that tower. The system is set in place and years go by. NO ONE has reliable cell service around that tower. In the valleys around it are still large dead zones. Then I read about Poc Radio in Maine. Its push to talk over cellular. AT&T has some agreement with the state of Maine to start building a network for first responders and law enforcement where everyone will use Poc Radios over the cell towers. I just about fell out of my chair laughing. I thought about all of these towns blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars on these radio systems, some of them completely encrypted. Then I thought about all of us who monitor these entities and how we all get irritated about them going encrypted. There goes our radio hobby. Ham radio is pretty much dead unless you stay up night and day flipping from one band to another on HF like a lunatic and now we are about to see our scanners go dead. It probably wont happen for awhile due to the issue of over inflated coverages maps from the way I read it. They actually have to go out and do RF studies because most of these coverage maps are showing service where there is none. I know, I know, what if the cell towers go down? They will have to go back to radios. Wrong. Cell towers don't go down. I have known of one in my life and it was up on Sugarloaf. Anyhow, the US government is paying a lot for this and the state of Maine is about to put money towards it. I guess the good thing about it is that eventually maybe the FCC will start letting us common folk use all of the unused public safety frequencies. Probably highly unlikely but one can dream.
