D1029659,
I meant to post this the other day but got sidetracked and forgot.....
In Rowan County when a Fire Department is dispatched they are assigned an OPS talkgroup on our P25 system. OPS 1-11 are used for any incidents inside the City of Salisbury, and OPS 12-35 are used for incidents everywhere else in the county including in the smaller municipalities. Those TG's are used for anything from EMS calls to working structure fires. However, there are certain businesses and buildings in the city and other locations in the county where we use 8TAC91 - 8TAC94 in talkaround/direct mode. If you happen to be listening to our stuff and hear switch to 91 Direct that's what that means.
We also still have a number of VHF and UHF frequencies that are still licensed to either the city or county that aren't used on a regular basis. For example 154.0850 was at one time the primary dispatch frequency for Salisbury FD. 154.0700 & 153.5550 are still Fireground 1 & 2 respectively, but are scarcely if ever these days. 458.0500 is the old input frequency for the Sheriff's Office dispatch and 453.0500 was the receive frequency for that repeater. Although they aren't used much if at all these days we keep those licenses because VHF & UHF because getting licenses in those bands these days isn't easy.
Daily use wise 154.2500 is our county fire dispatch frequency. It is a simplex channel only. A number of departments in the county still keep both VHF and 800 radios installed in the trucks. They use the VHF to communicate to Rowan, and the 800 for the OPS TG while enroute to calls. If you listen to the P25 system it's not hard to tell when someone is on VHF lol. 155.7150 is our EMS Dispatch frequency. Both of these two channels are patched into the P25 system fulltime, however if we experienced a complete trunked system failure these two transmitters will still work. State Fire, 154.2800, is also patched into the P25 system.
I know this thread was originally about Iredell County but when I read the post above about Rowan only using the trunked system I wanted to chime in on that, since I use our VHF & P25 systems everyday. I know I replied once before but thought I'd expand a little more on it