Everyone has a lot of questions, so I'll try to answer even though I don't work for Loudoun.
The whole problem with this pursuit is training; either a vehicle that is not involved in the pursuit stops and radios ahead to another county/VSP what is going on or the dispatcher does this. The dispatcher dropped the ball, by not creating the patch, all they had to do was create the patch, then transmit "Clarke to Loudoun, I have a Pursuit, it is patched to SIRS". Loudoun does the same and the dispatchers out and the troops get where they need to go.
Carke does have SIRS and uses it every day to talk with Warren County to tone out FS 06 when they have calls going in Warren or Clarke. I have heard the call for the occasional state unit to work MVA's, but only while I'm at home. The problem with Clarke's SIRS is that it has a very limited footprint, that’s probably why you never hear them.
At Fairfax, the old GE Master continually blew its tube finals; finally it was taken off of the air in 1999. It took the Beltway Sniper to get a temporary radio back on the air, a Kenwood TK-6110 from the Sheriff's Office patched through an ACU-1000. That's how the old CIB 1 and CIB 2 ended up being used for the SIRS and PMARS talkgroups so personnel could scan them on our 800 radios. This patch stayed on the air for years until 3 years ago; we installed a Motorola CDM-1250 on tone remote.
Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax and Prince William all have SIRS at their Dispatch Centers and I don't have an answer as to why nobody uses it. You will hear me test connectivity Low Band to 800 and 800 to Low Band every Tuesday morning at 0800 for my county and somebody has had to have heard me, I'm on it all of the time. At Fairfax, it is monitored at two different consoles (PSTOC & Sheriff's Office). The majority of VSP vehicles have had the new equipment installed and are using Motorola CDM 750's, I don't think that any more Aerotron's are GE Master 2's are out there. I do hear the calls on a daily basis "Loudoun to the State Unit working Loudoun for a motor vehicle accident" and it goes unanswered.
As for the DOJ agencies in the clear, that will all end as IWIN goes live. The thread that I refer to defiantly put several Federal Agents lives in jeopardy. An hour after it was posted and the play by play was being placed on the thread as it was happening, the bad guy stops the car, pulls a rifle and starts shooting at the aircraft. Thankfully the aircraft was too high to be hit and this was in a rural area with the ground units two miles back, this the main reason why we are pushing for more encryption. And yes I did go plug the frequency in when I saw the post, I felt bad for the agents; all they had to do was move a switch to engage their encryption. They too have seen the thread and are taking steps to secure their operations.
I don't know anyone over in Clarke, so I can't comment on that. But we have tried to work with them and they don't want to work with anyone on the EMS/FD or LE side. So they become stuck on the island by themselves.
It's not question that Loudoun had to have all the bells and whistles, the 3.X system is not being supported anymore. What are you going to do with an XTS3000, Astro Spectra or zone controller when you can't buy parts anymore? Do you buy an XTL/XTS 5000 that will not be supported in 5 more years or do you buy an APX that will be supported for the next 12 years? Loudoun and everyone else have to pull the trigger and buy new systems/subscriber equipment. That's the reality we all live in. The advantage for a TDMA system is that you get double the available channels while the system is in TDMA, if you could buy a system for the same price as an FDMA system and get the advantage of more channels that would reduce the amount of busies to nothing, what would you buy given the option?
I can say that all of the system managers do talk and advise each other of what is in the pipeline and we do work together to maintain the Level 6 interoperability that we enjoy. I have everything from Montgomery, Prince Georges and Charles Counties Md. to Rappahannock County Va. programmed in all of my personnel’s radios.
All of this interoperability in MWCOG started on January 13, 1982 with a snow blizzard, Air Florida Flight 90 crash on the Potomac and a rapid rail transit accident on WMATA 30 minutes after the plane crash. All of us in public safety have made great strides in our capabilities since that time when everyone was on an Island by themselves. To go back 30 years and operate like we did is unthinkable in today’s climate. I can guarantee, that all agencies in MWCOG will remain interoperable each other.