Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 12:45 PM
Post Narrowbanding - FD Radios
Just continuing our thinking outloud services :-)
Note 1 - lets assume that all emergency ambulances are operating on
the FD radio channels
1. For a one channel radio - the local channel will be the 1 channel
2. For a 2 channel radio - I suspect that the most common channel set
up is - Channel 1 - local channel - Channel 2 - 154.28
3. For a 3 channel radio - we can have many options - most common
could be - Ch 1 Local - Ch 2 154.28 - Ch 3 153.83 low power
4. I cant imagine that any self respecting FD still uses radios with
less than 16 channels. If the unit does have less than 16 channels, it
is probably over 20 years old, and cannot be relied upon to travel
safely out of county anyhow. So it is not really available for mutual
aid.
5. Lets count up the new interops and fire / ems channels. Maybe there
will be >>>- 153.8225 - 153.83 - 153.8375 - 154.2575 - 154.265 -
154.2725 - 154.28 - 154.2875 - 154.295 - 154.3025 - 155.2725 - 155.28
- 155.2875 - 155.3325 - 155.34 - 155.3475 - plus the 5 Vtac channels -
so that is 21 channels
6. The federal wildfire community has many nationwide channels also
(maybe just west of the Missisppi River actually) - 168.625 - 168.65 -
168.20 - etc - plus the NIFC caches - maybe another 30 channels here
(some of which are repeaters)
7. The federal wildfire community also has many air to ground channels.
8. Looks like there are plenty of channels to handle most incidents -
short of a nuclear blast I suppose
9. Million dollar question - should the fire service go to cellular /
LTE, or migrate to VHF high?