Here in my area of Will County Wescom PDFD and Bolingbrook have back-up 800 conv- freqys for that problem....They were in use awhile back when tower 113 here was shut down for repairs....
State mandates have always been political instruments designed to benefit 20 Illinois metro counties. The other 85 counties (where many VFD's have annual budgets less than $50,000) are hard pressed to comply, and often lose capability in the name of progress. The Illinois state wide TICP and SCIP reflect that. At home we have a VHF analog multi-site voting system that works well and puts all county responders on the same page. /\/\other doesn't like that.
Life & Safety Critical fire ground comms should always be on a simplex system - a FF working interior attack calling MAYDAY should go direct to me, or me calling EVACUATE direct to interior without any fixed infrastructure to fail. Using repeaters and trunking systems for that purpose has historically filled the LODD's with fatalities.
Here in downstate rural Forgotonia we all use the VHF MABAS-IL 'color' channels for ops. That works perfectly in the half mile 'bubble' on scene. Mutual aid responders with a different band radio or a proprietary 'special' channel make interoperability a challenge.
It makes no difference whether
all mutual aid partners use VHF, UHF or 800... as long as there is a common path without gateways, repeaters or '
Dispatch- call the water-haulers on their channel and tell them they are backing up to the wrong drop tank!' components. That situation is my biggest fear in this thread.
"Get a grant" suggestions are pointless. AFG used to be $3B annual. This round AFG is less than $700M, and is earmarked for training. What little federal grant money is available to VFD's goes elsewhere. Illinois is, well, Illinois.
And no, I still can't confirm or deny anything.
www2.illinois.gov
