I apologize for venting to you but I think the understanding is I activily use my scanner as another part of the response tothe fire station for a house reported on fire or a person trapped in a car. Its my only way to hear additional info about the call and I would rather spend my money once on an expensive scanner instead of mulitple times on less durable scanners.
Not a problem, you have a very legitimate need that is not being met by the new technology. To me that isn't a failure of the scanner manufacturers, but a failure of the people who are choosing the technology that is being used by fire departments. The feds are pushing everyone to P25 by requiring that technology be used when grant money is involved. The result is that departments can only afford a few radios, pagers are not an option, costs go way up, etc.
p25 has it's place, but it's being way over applied. Fire agencies should be retaining some analog capabilities at minimum. I think even most departments should be staying 100% analog. This would reduce costs, allow pagers to be used, and make interoperability a very simple task.
Technology is being abused. This is due to the government forcing it on agencies, and the radio manufacturers pushing it way to hard for the sake of increasing profits. The bureaucrats that are running many agencies are choosing these technologies because often they don't have enough knowledge to make an informed decision. The sales guys are pushing the higher priced stuff due to the profit margin. In the end, it's the guy who actually uses the radio that looses out.
Yep, digital radio is a fact of life, but it isn't the only option. Analog radio still works fine. I don't think I've seen a modern radio released, even p25 digital high end radios, that won't do analog. Why agencies are not using this is troubling. Analog is about as interoperable as you can get, yet they choose to overcomplicate things. Job security, I guess.
I recently retired an 18 year old Motorola analog trunked system. There were a fair number in very upper management that were either pushing for P25 or assuming it was the only option. I had to spend some time explaining what P25 was and why we didn't necessarily need it. In the end we went with NexEdge. What that choice got us was more radios in the hands of people. While we could have spent $1500 to $2000 (or more) per radio, we chose the system that allowed us to purchase $600 radios. We still got exactly what we needed, and in the end we were able to get more radios in the hands of people in the field. Sure, there are interoperability issues, our garbage trucks can't communicate with a police officer 3 counties over anytime they want, but so what? Why do they need that. The radios do analog just fine, so we put up a conventional analog repeater and our interoperability issues are solved. Cost savings were in the area of $600,000 between the P25 and NexEdge systems. In the end, the average Joe radio user doesn't know the difference. They can still talk to who they need to, and we saved a lot of money.
Too bad that you are stuck on the loosing end of this. This shouldn't be the case. It doesn't need to be this way.