Thinking about USA wildfire freqs for 2013. There are 5 "national" air
to air / air to ground freqs - limited to 10 watts each. There are 6
"national" ground tac freqs limited to 5 watts each - portables only.
There is 1 "national" freq dedicated to smokejumpers. Would it make
more sense to just lump all 12 freqs together?
There are also 1 or 2 'air to ground' freqs allocated to each radio
zone. Many of these are reused across the western USA. There is also
168.625 "national" guard channel and 168.65 "national" flite following
freq.
The other primary consideration here is that most portable radios seem
to have 16 channels per bank.
Further info - this is all VHF - VTac freqs are now nationwide (in
theory) - 154.28 154.295 154.265 are legacy fire mutual aid channels
in many areas
Question - do the Feds actually have more portable radios than
firefighters? Max seems to be 19,000 people working at fires. If they
have 10,000 radios at Boise - plus all the local radios - they must
have well over 20,000 radios.
Maybe Bank 1 should be day to day bank - Vtac Call + 168.625 + 154.28
+ 13 local channels. Maybe Bank 2 should be for a 1 alarm fire - Vtac
Call + 168.625 + 154.28 + local air to ground + couple of command
repeaters plus some local tac channels. Maybe Bank 3 should be field
programmable for a major Type 1 fire. (I think they might be doing
this sort of setup already).