I did 35 years in municipal law enforcement and was the coordinator for a Motorola 800 Mhz Spectra-Tac conventional two-channel system. We had four transmit sites and five receiver sites. Our first radios (this is 1986) were MX-340's. We had 53 in our fleet, and 45 of them were in for service during the first two years for various issues. 10 of them were "Plan X'ed," meaning that they were in for repairs for 3 or more times, then we were given factory replaced radios. I would average two trips a week to the repair facility (25 miles each way) over those two years. Once the entire fleet was more or less working, we upgraded to Motorola MT-2000's; All 53 were replaced, and for the next several years, we had a minimum of repairs, examples being entire volume control knobs broke off at the radio, in the weather for too long, etc. Various failures, nothing at all like we had with the MX-340's. We only had a handful of mobile radios, none of which ever had any service issues.
I bring up this series of events up in the message thread because these radios were expensive, and back in the day, they still weren't "state of the art" for our application. We had a few other more expensive models available, but the budget allowed us x amount of dollars and didn't have any service policy in place, just the factory warranty.
Sadly, this system was almost totally placed out of commission, due to the agency I worked for went to a central dispatch system over a Statewide P25 digital trunked radio network (Starcom21). My former employer removed all the satellite receive sites, de-commissioned the secondary channel, and use an on-site repeater for their public works department.
