If they join us in Hall, say good bye to hearing them. Except fire pagers will remain on VHF most likely, as the P25 pagers are quite expensive. As soon as we are done fielding our Phase II system, we be flipping the switch to full encryption on fire and EMS. All law enforcement on our system is already encrypted (mostly, some interesting things pop up in surprising placed). Keeping Event 1-4 unencrypted because no one wants to share our encryption keys, and of course we have the interop 800 mhz repeaters. CID is currently unencrypted but will be if they make up their minds. Several other agencies like NEGMC hospital and Medical Transport, among others, also use our system and are fully encrypted. So nothing of interest will be heard unless you work with us or listen to the occasional Event 4 Lake Lanier boat accident or drowning. That's the only way we can communicate with Forsyth and Gwinnett anyway, who are also encrypted on the fire/EMS side. It's funny they mention hooking into our system, since they would have talked to me about that option and they haven't. I'm not too keen on letting Jackson on board, maybe Taggart is but he's an old Motorola guy, and a nice fellow - but I think we both agree we are not into the sharing game, sorry Jackson. Our school buses just went VHF DMR and we have many talkgroups that are actually unencrypted currently, but people aren't generally aware of them at all and wouldn't be unless we do some very serious interoperabilitiy. Once we get done fielding all the APX's though, those holes will be closed too and encrypted - sorry, it's what everyone here wants. I like transparency but am greatly outnumbered in that. I also like interoperability but honestly, every time we send an assignment to Gwinnett to work a structure fire or to interestate 85 to work a multi vehicle accident, the officer coordinates with the other county and sometimes is given a radio - but our guys seldom have reason to need a radio to talk to another county, even in out of county work and chases/emergencies. They prefer talking back to their own (our) dispatch anyway, and the guys that go interior on a house fire don't all carry radios anyway; the policy is a minimum of 1 radio per search or attack crew, and although we'd rather have everyone with a radio, we routinely work events (and most every jurisdiction does) where the radio doesn't even get out of the structure to a repeater on the TRS, and almost nobody every actually uses the simplex fireground frequencies we have - they don't want to use them, they don't care about them, the don't think about them. We just communicate using our good old voices instead. That makes me nervous at times if there is a poor fellow to get separated from his crew or falls into the basement, but we live in an imperfect world. Heck we run Med 2 and 11 into White County quite often when they run out of ambulances and there's no reason we need to talk on their VHF DMR system, they keep up with their times and assignments via our dispatch and the MDTs (when they actually happen to be working!).
Plus good old DNR and GSP have radios that communicate outstandingly with us on our system, in addition to their VHF P25 frequencies - so interop with them is seemless.
I find it sad and funny at the Jackson County findings. We work in Braselton frequently with Jackson fire/SO/Braselton PD, and the guys never seem to have problems getting out on their radio, especially with all the sites they have. I85 is, strangely, somewhat more dodgy for them in coverage but one time we did mutual aid with them on a multivehicle accident, they just used one of our radios to talk to our dispatch who then relayed a message back to their dispatch via phone. Shrug. Poor taxpayers though, pay for 18-20 years on a system they will be told is obsolete in less than 10 years.
