My last experience working with radios was for a Motorola shop up till 99 or 2K. I installed E911 radio/ telco and dispacth equipment. In those days the Quantar was top dog. Very expensive. I see now, you can buy 800mhz Quantars on Egag for next to nothing---150 bucks or so. You can covert them for 900 mhz amateur use, so they are not useless I thought I was having fun doing that, but looking back did not get paid nearly enough, especially for the time away from home, and I didn't even have a family.
Biggest system we installed was a revamp of the Spokane fire com system, inspired by "Firestorm" because various depts could not inter-communicate. We re tuned, moved, and reconfigured much of the gear they had. Lots of remote receivers for multi-site improved receiver coverage, the audio of which was linked by various means to the downtown dispatch to a voter. Radio audio was linked every way you could imagine----by dedicated RF link, by fiber, rented dry pair, and the county microwave link. All the receivers on several channels was linked to dispatch, through voters, and then back out to wherever the transmitters were, so, multi receiver repeated systems, as well as base station operation from the dispatch.
Back then pagers were big, and we installed a few PD/ fire/ EMT paging systems, too.
I don't remember what site this was at, this is in a surplus military comm camper. I built all this, cut down an old GE rack. Top unit is a paging Quantar with encoder above it. Bottom two are repeaters for two different frequencies. This was for Adams Co. WA sheriff and fire. We had I think 3 repeater sites all on same freq. Deputies selected which repeater by name of channel, which simply changed the PL tone (CTCSS)
