[Exsmokey]

At present the National Incident Radio Support Cache has seven tactical, seven command pairs, and seven logistics pairs allocated on a permanent basis. Following some large fires last year in Arizona and southern California people posted monitoring tacs and commands of 8+, as that is what they were called over the air. When I compared their lists to the frequencies shown in the VHF Interoperability Plan I found many, if not all, of these "8+" frequencies came from this plan. I have a suspicion that the 8+ tacs and commands are not assigned permanently, but are assigned on an incident by incident basis. A frequency might be Tac 8 on an incident and later in the season on another incident another frequency from this plan will be assigned and labeled as "Tac 8."

Now that I have a couple of PSR-600's in my listening arsenal, I've programmed all the frequencies in this plan into one scan list. I did not have the memory capacity in previous scanners to do this. I plan to monitor the Interoperability Plan frequencies, along with the Support Cache frequencies that are programmed into another scan list, whenever a large incident occurs. I hope we don't have many large destructive fires this year, but if we do I would encourage everyone to log what they hear and post it on RR. Eventually we might figure out how these channels are being assigned.