Lake County Ohio HELP

[kf8yk]

The radios in use (Motorola XTS, XTL, and APX series) support both 700 and 800 MHz frequencies. Radios can roam from an 800 MHz site to a 700 MHz site with no problem; the system can mix 700 and 800 MHz frequencies within the same site if needed. The antennas supplied with these mobiles and portables have acceptable SWR over both 700 and 800.

The choice of 700 vs 800 usually comes down to using whatever you can get a license for. Sites like Lake and Geauga that are replacing older Smartzone systems are reusing the 800 MHz freqs already licensed, new sites like Cuyahoga use 700 MHz since it's has open frequencies for licensing and it's not impacted by the rebanding freeze.

So, is there any word on whether Lake/Geauga will ever move to the 700MHz band or will they stay 800MHz for the next "1x" years? Are the current radios capable of the switch? This confuses me because if this behaves like the old MARCS system, it is my understanding that when a radio no longer has support from the tower it is usually on it will jump to the next control channel it picks up and lock onto that system. if the Cuyahoga county system on on 76x.xxxxx and the Lake/Geauga systems are on 86x.xxxx...

It seems to me that physics won't allow this to be an efficient hand-off (antenna SWR mainly)...

UNLESS, the radios are equipped with diplexers AND are capable of such a wide tx window.

Am I overanalyzing the situation?

 

[KC8ESL]

Thank you both. I knew someone on here would know what is going on.

I suppose I had never considered that the radios would just be the ham radio equivilant of a 2m/70cm using a dualband antenna.

I am not sure if this is the place to bring this up but isn't it a waste of money to let 2 counties galavant about on 800MHz and everyone else establish on 700MHz? What are the chances the other 26 counties in the system at the moment will ever travel to Lake count and use the system ? I suppose I am suggesting that a single band radio and antenna system (portable and mobile) is more cost-effective than the dual band setups?

 

[kf8yk]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.4; en-us; DROID Pro Build/4.5.1-110-VNS-35) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1)

The 700 band ends at 806 MHz and the 800 band begins at 806 MHz. Try to get out of the mindset of treating these bands as distinct and treat the 700 band as an expansion of the 800 band.

There are some technical and regulatory differences between these bands but for your specific question on radio compatibility you can consider 700 and 800 a singular band

 

[puzzleriddle]

pro96

will NOT turntrack the 700mhz band. may be able to follow in Conventional mode..Win96 - The RadioReference Wiki

 

[KC8ESL]

Thats why I just found a refurbished BCD396XT on amazon for $305.99!