I am showing my age here too but does anyone remember when the highway patrol used (I think) 42.12 as a point to point between troop dispatch centers?
42.38 was the old troop point to point......As far as I know, there's no longer a frequency for troop-to-troop.
It might just be my imagination but the signal "seems" weaker and fainter.
I don't think it's your imagination......I don't pick up the entire state as well as I did years ago.....I think the problem is that there are no vendors that manufacture low band radios with the same power they used years ago.
This might explain the number of relays compared to prior years, as well as the lower-powered "fill-in" transmitters that most troops now have.
When I first started scanning in the 70's.......troop A only had 2 relays, and troop H only had 2 relays. Today, troop H has 4 UHF relays.
In the old days, I think a lot of small problems were overcome with the brute-force of a higher power radio. With lower power, it seems that simple things, like antenna radiation pattern matter more. For example, I've noticed that I've been able to get a good signal from a car southbound from a specific mile marker, but when I hear a car from the same location going northbound, it's almost unreadable.
If a car is traveling at a high rate of speed, the signal becomes unreadable.
I've also noticed that I am able to hear the Missouri park rangers (same low band as HP) at a greater distance than the troopers. Their antennas are base loaded, center mounted on the roof of their vehicles......(jeep cherokee, i think).