Now down to buisness. I have just recently taken over as the radio equipment coordinator for my local fire department. We are located in Illinois and currently using the Statewide P25 Starcom21 radio system for all primary radio communications, however we use our old analog VHF repeater system in wideband mode for paging, which we share with 3 other nearby departments. The paging channel is patched into the Starcom21 system to provide radio information to firefighters responding that only have pagers. We also still maintain all our previous VHF equipment to use as a backup in case this new fancy radio system goes down completely (it has happened a couple times) not to mention that two of our trucks potentially could get called to respond mutual aid quite a long distance through MABAS. I have a decent working knowledge of radio equipment and what is required to come into complaince with the new narrowbanding rules, but have a few questions.
First, we plan on using the same frequencies we currently use, just changing them over to narrowband mode. All our radio equipment is capable of this except a couple MT1000 portables that we will take out of service. My question is can we change individual radios over a couple at a time and still have them work properly. Money is an issue so having techs come out to both our engine houses and reprogram ever piece of radio equipment at once is difficult. What I want to do is starting with the repeater itself, have radios reprogrammed systematically. Basically can a radio set for wideband hear and talk with a radio set for narrowband and vice versa. And we (and the otehr departments) carry Minitor V pagers, do they have a programming setting for wideband or narrowband.
Any advice anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated
