Police towers

[Dfwlistener]

I got a question about repeaters.

I'm still not used to this big county repeaters system, I come from a place where we only had conventional duplex systems.

So I've seen that some places here have big repeaters and that is fine. However I've seen that almost every police station has a tower with multiple antennas on it. It makes me think of a local Repeater to relay the signal to the local cars. However using a directional antenna i am not sure I get the signal from that specific police tower, I still have the feeling like I'm getting the signal from the big center Repeater.
Can anybody please clarify this situation for me?

This is the tower from one of the police stations I'm talking about:

 

[mmckenna]

There's a lot of reasons they could have a tower at the station that isn't part of the repeater system:

- The design of the repeater system may not require a transmitter at the station. There may be sufficient coverage from another site.
- It may be a regional system, and like above, the coverage from that system is good enough.
- Depending on the repeater system, they may be running a receive only site at the station. That can work well for low power portable radios. The received signal is hauled back to the radio system and passed through a voting system to pick the best received signal.
- The tower may just be used for other services. If there is a dispatch center there, the may use microwave to haul traffic back into the system.
- The tower may be used for radios in the station for other uses, like mutual aid.