I would venture to guess that a UHF P25 machine would have better coverage in a area such as Seattle.

Actually the 800 radios are sucking inside buildings. Ask any fireman who responds to a high-rise. The first thing they have to do is abandon their repeaters and switch to simplex. I assume it's the radios, not the frequencies, but don't honestly know.

I had a customer / dealer in Texas who sold all of his 800MHz licenses to Nexthell and them moved to 450/460 MHz for his LTR style trunking.

He swore the in building penetration is superior on 800 vs. UHF.

I can't speak for other agencies, but prior to the switch to trunking, SFD had receivers in many hi-rises in downtown Seattle. One building I worked in had one, and the antenna was basically a coil of radiax in the bottom of the elevator pit. It may have spanned the shaft as well, but I never went up there.


It's tricks like that that can make a band appear to be "better".

'Course, Southcenter enjoys a cool trick that a frequent guest here played a role in, and from what I hear the 800 coverage there is now quite extensive.

Trying to fill every nook and cranny of a region like ours, both in building and in all of our valleys is next to impossible, regardless of band choice, without adding some tricks.

This reminds me what happened during the Nisqually shaker.
The Super 800 system went down.

Huh? I thought everyone was just getting bonked due to the high amount of traffic.

People were getting bonked because of user error. When you get a bonk due to the system being busy, you are suppose to let go of the PTT and wait for the ready beeps. When you have heard the ready beeps, rekey your radio with your traffic. What was happening was that people would get a bonk and rekey the radio without waiting. So not only do you have a request for access on your 2nd rekey but you will also have your original request for the 1st PTT keying. So with everyone not knowing how to use their radios, they kept on rekeying their radio when they got a bonk and overloaded it with endless "Q's in the system. So the control channel got overloaded more than the VCs

There should be a way to let first responders have priority and keep the garbage trucks and janitors and the like off until an incident moderates.