I have been following you and have much respect for your knowledge. The fact that you're not certain about Northern California tells me as a relative newcomer I don't know any better.
I really haven't spent any time up in Northern California but I did look up California Highway 3 and see how it goes through the national forest. From what I know, low band is ideal for that environment because it bounces off of the mountain walls. The downside is high noise levels and when the skip is in it makes it very difficult for the dispatchers to maintain communications with their actual units. I can't imagine how many sites they would have to put in to cover that pass. I call it a pass but it looks like it's a hundred miles long.
It's a pretty stretch of highway. Some very deep canyons that I doubt VHF Low would be able to fully conquer. CHP also covers a lot of other roads that are not state highways. There some very small local roads up there that are way down deep in canyons along rivers that will be a challenge for anything.
Overall, Northern California seems to be a great challenge. I went to repeaterbook and tried to look up repeater sites and see that they have very few north of Sacramento. That also includes those on the Oregon side. I can't see how they're going to do 800 MHz trunking.
I think that's why they are using VHF at some of these CRIS sites.
But then again I really don't know what I'm talking about. It seems that Southern California as well as the Bay Area communities up north have it all worked out. My wife and I do a bit of traveling and listen to CHP for traffic reports. Once they go to a trunked encrypted system that'll be the end of that. What are newspapers and TV stations going to do?
I know when I watch the news on KTLA they show a map every morning where incidents are located. Will we see CHP give them a special radio and a pinky swear that what they hear they won't repeat? You know that if they hear it they're going to race to the scene of an incident.
Locally, the TV/Radio news traffic reports are verbatim reading off the above website.
There's certainly the option to arrange providing an RX only radio with encryption keys to credentialed media. Will be interesting to see if that happens or not.
I understand logistically how trunking is advantageous. Especially if one loops in Caltrans. That would mean that CHP could talk directly to Caltrans. In talking with some of the Big Bear CHP officers they tell me a couple of their cars actually have/had 800 MHz radios in them and can/could come up on either the San Bernardino County Sheriff's system or Caltrans directly. But those are the oddities.
All the CHP cars/SUV's/trucks have 800MHz radio in them. They have a stack of 4 Kenwood/EFJohnson radios that cover VHF Low, VHF High, UHF and 700/800MHz. In addition to the standard CHP stuff, they also load in local agencies for interoperability.
It would seem to me that rather than reinvent the wheel, CHP would lease space on existing government systems. It's my understanding that the California Department of Homeland Security has issued a dictate that any County that wants Federal money that's given directly to the states has to go encrypted.
I think you may be misunderstanding that. CalOES runs the state radio systems, including CHP.
US DHS (federal level) does do some grant funding, but they don't mandate encryption that I'm aware of. They do require that radios purchased with federal grant funds support P25 and be able to support AES256 encryption. Also, AES256 is the only encryption algorithm that meets the federal standards for encryption of PII/CJI.
Law enforcement does have some requirements to protect CJI/PII, and it must be protected. Doesn't mean that radio traffic have to be encrypted, just means that when that CJI/PII is transmitted over the radio, that it is encrypted.
That's a side issue and I know encryption isn't based on frequency. Will CHP partner with various Sheriff's departments regardless of what frequency they are on? That seems to make the most sense rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.
The CHP has suitable radios to talk to local agencies. Not sure how often that happens, but they have the capability. I've filled out forms for our agency that provided the appropriate info for them to program their radios with our frequencies. The chief signed the memorandum of understanding that allows them to use our frequencies if needed.
CRIS has intersystem interface capability. In other words, the CRIS P25 cores can connect to other P25 cores and allow it to act like one large radio system. <— that is an oversimplified statement, but essentially what they can do. There's a lot of stuff that happens to make that work. Requires agreements between the state and local agencies/system operators.
Plus, a cellular interface. Or would they simply put remote receivers/repeaters on cellular towers?
The towers that cell carriers use are usually operated by one of the large tower companies. They charge a lot for access. The state would benefit from using their own towers (they have a lot) before leasing space.
