A Common occurance when an agency has narrowbanded and the Radios Tech's did not adjust the audio balance.
The problem stems from either the lack of expertise or lack of time when a radio was narrow banded. The tech doing the work is relying on the radio manufacturer properly aligning the radio when it was first made. In most cases, the narrow band alignment was not adjusted correctly. Even the Motorola radios coming off the line are not set correctly.
The second cause is that many radio techs do not always have a service monitor with them. So the radio simply got switched in the software programming and they went onto the next radio. When you have several thousand radios to software set from wide to narrow, your boss is hanging over your head to get the work done. There is little time to bench check each radio while making the switch. As a result, many radios have snuck past the radar and have low audio. You would have hoped that at least the dispatch control station and the repeaters were done correctly.
But as my travels around the country, working with many public safety agencies have proved, there are many radios with low deviation today. Since the cell phone has all but killed the local radio shops these days, a new way of generating work has emerged. It's called time and materials service calls.
Back 20 years ago, you could make a good living servicing 2 way radios. Both the business community and the public safety market provided plenty of service work to the many radio shops. Then the cellular boom took off. Companies found that the could have much better contact over greater distances for less money a year. So they dumped their radio systems for cell phones. Why buy a radio for over a $1000 and have limited coverage when you can get cellular service for less money and be able to use it almost anywhere in the country.
The cell phone craze just about killed the 2 way service shops. You had to expand your reach for customers just to be able to keep the doors open. Many of the radio shops branched out into other fields. Like alarm systems, closed circuit TV systems, sound systems and the likes. Along the way, it became apparent that time on the job costs money. So the ability to pull out the service monitor for every simple touch of every radio went down the chute. Result is very few radios today see the touch of a service monitor unless there is a major problem or the customer is willing to spend the extra money on the time it takes.
The radio shops that provide a service contract on radios are even tighter with their time today. Unless the radio is receiving major complaints about how it works or sounds, the service monitor will never get close to those radios. Look at it from the prospective of the service shop. Every minute they spend looking at a radio under contract, is money out of their pocket. Every mile the radio service tech has to drive to get to a radio to look at it is money out of the pocket of the radio shop.
This is why most radio service contracts run in the order of at least $50 or $60 or more a month per radio. If you have both a mobile and a portable radio for each person out in the field, it gets expensive real fast every month for a company or public safety agency.
