Looking for EMS services using 800 megahertz radio systems in a on-call (small-rural) setting.
Our county (Itasca county MN) will be switching to this system in the fall of 07.
We are pager dispatched at the present time and with the new system we are told paging isn’t available.
Asking for ems people in similar situation, and how it works for you.
As a scanner listener in the Maryland DC - Baltimore area I can tell you that 800 mhz trunked does not support paging (aka thru a Minotor) however every jurisdiction I listen to retains their old lo-band, uhf and vhf frequencies for just this purpose. For example, Montgomery Co Md still tones out calls on 154.16 mhz (dispatch) but tones do not cross on TTID 3344 (trunked dispatch). Pagers are still programmed to the old analog frequencies.
I suggest you search / ask the forums at Radio Reference for the best information.
I wasn’t a firefighter exactly, but I have fair knowledge of one suburban department’s transition to an 800 Mhz digital trunked system: absolute hell.
The radios didn’t work literally half the time in spite of the city investing 25 million dollars worth of radio infrastructure into approximately 50 square miles of space, and a separate VHF paging system was maintained to deliver alpha-numeric pages. Good thing too, or those firefighters never would have gone anywhere half the time they were supposed to.
My county is still pouring money into the radio rathole and saying, “Soon.” The apparatus is on 800, but everything is cross-banded for dispatch and zone to the low-band Minitors.
Thats exactly what i was afraid of. thank you all for the info, I will print this and send it to our radio board.