As Hpycmpr says, having the conventional analog channels available can come in mighty handy at times. There were (are) 4 statewide repeater systems in WY: WHP on 155.4450, DOT on 156.1050, SALECS on 155.6400 and Mutual Aid on 154.8750. Each system is on about 26 sites and offers about 88-90% mobile radio geographical coverage. When WyoLink went in, all the analog repeaters were upgraded to Quantars and tied into the Tx/Rx trunking combiner systems for IM protection. The analog systems were narrowbanded in 2012 in accord with FCC rules and, other than Mutual Aid, currently are not seeing a lot of use.
So ... what we have here are 4 complete, intact, independent, operational, paid-for, in-place, already licensed and reliable statewide VHF repeater systems that have all their remote sites tied back to the central dispatch facility in Cheyenne by piggybacking on the digital microwave backhaul system that was upgraded for WyoLink use. And, being that WyoLink is also VHF, the same radio can be programmed for both trunking as main use and analog repeaters for immediate backup.
The question then is, what is it costing the citizens to keep these backup systems available for immediate use in the event of some kind of catastrophic trunking outage. They're through infant mortality where any failures were covered under warranty, so now it is just routine maintenance, absent a massive lightning strike or power surge. Since the tech is already scheduled to go to the site for trunking maintenance anyway, it is just the incremental cost for the time to do checkouts on 3 additional analog repeaters while he is there (he's already doing Mutual Aid) at about 15 minutes per repeater. Internal loaded costs are $47/hour, so keeping each of the 3 statewide analog radio networks on-line and up to snuff comes to ($47 per hour x 26 sites x 1/4-hour per site) about $305.50 per year for each statewide VHF analog backup repeater system.
$305 per year for unlimited use of a VHF repeater system covering most of 97,000 square miles ... I'm pretty cheap and tight-fisted myself, but this looks like a bargain to me.
Regards,
Larry