Why some two-way radio networks can serve far more talkgroups than they have actual radio channels — and the real tradeoff hiding underneath that efficiency.
This is a companion question to simplex vs. half-duplex vs. full-duplex. That explainer asks how many directions a single channel can carry traffic in. This one asks a different question about the same scarce resource: when many separate talkgroups all need to share a limited set of radio channels, who gets to decide which group uses which channel, and when? Conventional and trunked systems answer that question in two fundamentally different ways, and the difference explains why a city with a few dozen radio channels can support a few hundred separate talkgroups without anyone ever seeming to run out of airtime — most of the time.