Yes they are usually set up that way but not always. You can look at our Sheriff in the San Bernardino Mountains who simply have a Motorola Astro Spectra on a power supply. Or Arcadia Police Department that before they went to ICIS had a mobile unit in the radio room and a tone remote. Their repeater site is a top Johnson Peak at 3200 feet above the city. No microwave to the site - simply a dispatcher with a mobile radio running through Centracom .
Sent from my SM-N920V using Tapatalk
I am from the flatlands in Florida, where 99% of the systems are 800 MHZ trunked, wireline control, simulcast. A lot of money spent with Motorola/MSI and GE/COMNET-MaCom/Erricson/Harris! No high mountains to blast from, nor valleys of darkness.
About 8 years ago, I did an interoperability study project in the California Central Valley. I got to see about seven counties worth of VHF and UHF systems. They ran the gamet from Kern County that was then on its sixth highly tuned generation of Simulcast, to an intentionally unnamed City where I met the poor exhausted technician who apologized for having been up for 72 hours straight patching the VHF repeater back together from 3 different MSR2000 cabinets. The transmitter in one, the receiver in another, and the power supply in the third. No kidding, I asked him which cabinet was the main dispatch channel and he waved his hand over all three cabinets and showed me all the cabling he had just patched the working 1/3 of each together.
I commented that it appeared there were BRAND NEW consoles, CAD and 911 call taker positions in the adjacent dispatch center. He said yes, but the IT Director still doesn't understand radio and he controls the budget! I noticed the pitiful repeater antenna was on an ancient wooden phone pole. As long as this technician played magician, no radio upgrades were being done, not even with narrow banding considered. I felt for the guy.
While this city was the worst in terms of RF infrastructure, it did set the tone for the report that OPERABILITY was a key element to inter-operability. My recommendations for many of the Counties was for wide area tactical channels, requiring voters and in some cases simulcast. Some counties relied on a myriad of stand alone repeaters, often on the same channel and activated by a PL tone selection, in order to fill in the valleys. It must truly be challenging for radio operators to keep track of the system during major incidents.
I got to visit some outstanding mountaintop repeater sites, some very well designed, others, were a throwback to installation practices of 35 years ago.
Sent from my SM-T350 using Tapatalk
