30-50 MHz is still heavily used by businesses and public safety in rural parts of the country. The state highway department in the state I live in uses a massive 45/47 MHz base-mobile and repeater system that recently went through upgrades. My understanding is that Motorola still makes VHF low band equipment.
The state police here use a P25 digital trunking system in the VHF high band (150-162 MHz) as their primary system but all state police cars, local sheriff's department cars have radios that sit on 39.54 MHz (aka "SIRS - Statewide Interagency Radio System) and police departments big and small have base stations on 39.540 MHz, often with patches to their trunking systems, allowing cars with 800 MHz radios to get on SIRS for interop purposes. When the state upgraded to digital trunking (supplied by Motorola) they replaced all their in-car lowband radios as part of the purchase, Motorola CDM750 radios with the 36-42 MHz split. As part of the digital system upgrade the state police installed base stations on 39.5400 / SIRS at each state police office and included the capability to transmit/receive remotely through the same microwave backbone used by the Project 25 digital voice system. Basically a state-wide "overlay" backup system on VHF lowband. The favorable propagation characteristics and just-pick-up-the-mic simplicity means its used on a daily basis in more rural areas of the state (think rural sheriff's offices with a couple cars working with state troopers).
I know that the California Highway Patrol makes extensive use of VHF low band (39 MHz, 42 MHz, 44 MHz and 45 MHz bands) and the US military also uses 30-50 MHz extensively.
I know that Ireland recently allocated 30-47 MHz to the amateur service on a secondary basis, shared with military users. I live in an urban area and even here there's use of lowband by construction companies, asphalt paving trucks and ready-mix concrete trucks chatting away on 30 MHz, 31 MHz, and 43 MHz. In places like New York City the 30 and 31 MHz bands are full of car services, Ubers, taxicab dispatchers and all sorts of other land mobile users.
While a lot of public safety users have moved to higher bands, VHF low band isn't dead. I'm pretty sure Motorola still makes low band equipment and I wanna say Yaesu still does as well (under the VERTEX) brand name.
EDIT:
I stand corrected. It appears that Motorola now owns VERTEX STANDARD. Looks like the Motorola CDM750 series of radios are discontinued. I guess the state police upgrade was before they took those radios off the market.
There are still large VHF low band networks in operation in certain parts of the country. I wonder of the Vertex VX-4000 and VX-5500 series of high power VHF lowband radios are still in production. I believe that's what California Highway Patrol uses for their system (that or maybe Kenwood radios?)
Another edit: The Motorola Solutions webpage does list the Vertex VX-6000 series of radios (available in a low band configuration as the "B" band, 37-50 MHz appears to be the only option)
https://www.motorolasolutions.com/en_us/products/vertex-standard/vx-6000.htmlThe massive move to 700/800 MHz and digital/trunked systems has caused a huge dump of lowband gear onto the secondhand and surplus market. I know eBay is full of lowband gear. The US military still uses VHF lowband (and midband!) for their FM (SINCGARS) land mobile systems, both in single channel (SC) and frequency hopping (FH) modes and that equipment is still being produced for the 30-88 MHz band. Maybe amateurs will get an 8 meter band allocation around 40 MHz (there are still government users of the 40/41 MHz region, including the Tennessee Valley Authority's wide-area TVA Transmission and Customer Service lowband system:
https://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Tennessee_Valley_Authority#Transmission_and_Customer_Service_.28TCS.29One of the major utilities in my area uses a hybrid of UHF and VHF lowband (48 MHz) for electrical service purposes, with statewide 48 MHz backup capability.
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