on another rant related to this is, What exactly is an outdated radio. I use my R390a that was built back in the 60's to monitor many various radio communications, WABC comes in even better on it than on the radio in my 2014 truck. Not knowing Verona's exact radio set up I would have to guess by what they are calling outdated radios are specific brand radios that were designed to work on a specific brand "system" in which the manufactor of the "system" only supports that product for a specific limited timeframe. A conventional radio set NEVER needs to be upgraded to keep working, An old Mocom 70 on 155.73 will work the same as the latest APX radio on 155.73 (narrowbanding is an entirely different rant and scam) Taking a quick look at Verona on google earth its hard to understand why there is a radio problem at all, It appears to be a extremely tiny town, A vhf low band or high band repeater located on a tower on a high elevation in town looks like it would give then good coverage within the town if not a 10-15 mile radius. I think they must have locked themselves into a "system" rather than a radio set up better suited to a tiny town, 2 police frequency's, 2 fire freqs, and local govt freq. for general comms. Many years ago radio requirements were driven by the physics of RF propagation, State police required large coverage footprints with minimum infrastructure and the VHF low band was was utilized and worked best for this, Smaller counties would also utilize low band and high band, and cities the UHF was adequate. Today communications are driven by corporate greed and government collusion, The industry "creates" what they call a standard such as P-25, VSLEP, Type-1, 2 TDMA, FDMA and collude with the agency responsible for radio communications to change rules that force states, counties, towns and businesses to replace perfectly good functioning radio sets with the new communications gear.
