$20MM seems like not enough. It’s easy to sneeze in $50,000 increments when you’re talking about tower climbs. And with 800Mhz, they’ll need more infrastructure and repeaters most likely. I don’t think they can just repopulate the same sites and get the same coverage.
@LabSpokane Yep... 800Mhz is problematic in rural areas. They poo-pooh VHF, but 800Mhz does not work well without a LOT of tower coverage. Any valleys/canyons and they are in deep trouble.
I used to install both and have done side by side coverage testing with 900 and VHF and VHF simply blows the doors of 900 for coverage. We literally tried everything to kill the VHF signal and couldn’t.
Of course VHF is crap for bandwidth. One really needs VHF+800+Cellular to actually provide a modern emergency services solution.
@LabSpokane@ai6yr this is why we still rely on VHF in the Western (mountainous) part of Boulder county, and use 800 MHz in the eastern (relatively flat) Metro area. And also why we use VHF in wildfire
@bud_t@LabSpokane@ai6yr Yeah in PNW SAR we use VHF for everything. Even that's not great in the mountainous terrain we operate in. But I can't imagine trying to operate with UHF in the same terrain.
@bud_t@LabSpokane@ai6yr Like, even with VHF sometimes we have to park a rig up on a ridgeline to provide comms relay for crews down in a drainage or something.
Another reason to stop hiring for-profit contractors and just directly employ people for public works projects. Nobody's going to be ordering obsolete cheap sh!t off ebay.
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