I'd love to have more service types in the radio, but the majority of people seem to have problems handling the ones that are there now...
Like I said earlier, Business is too broad a category for me and ends up full of junk that I have no interest in hearing. Strictly speaking, following the policy, all the following should be categorized as Business, but I have them under something else:
- Common channels for use on "resource roads" (logging roads and oilfield access roads) otherwise known in Western Canada as "LAD channels". I have these as Transportation because they are used to identify vehicles in movement to avoid collisions and other surprises on these narrow poor-visibility roads.
- Towing operators. As a first responder and heavy road user, I want to know what the highway situations are like, and tow ops are frequently at the pointy end of that particular stick. This one too gets Transportation.
- Gas plant and other industrial operations. If you tag them as Business they get lumped in with shopping malls, fast food restaurants, janitors, ski hills and golf courses, construction companies, radio companies renting/leasing their radios to miscellaneous companies, hotels, recreation centers, stadium operations, etc etc etc. I have reluctantly set up gas plants as utilities, even though they are not the public utilities such as commercial and residential gas & electric providers. They could benefit from a unique service tag (or a custom tag, if there were enough to go around - many of the ones I mention above should be broken out into their own or "custom" tags)
- Businesses which support railroad operations. My city has a large industrial park in the middle of its railyard which includes all manner of businesses such as locomotive and railcar maintenance, rail repair, diesel mechanics, automotive truck facilities (for fitting & maintaining hi-rail kits), and so on, none of which should really be in the Railroad category or else their comms gets buried in the chatter for rail movements on the trackage for the actual railroads themselves. I'm sacrificing one of my few Custom tags for this.
- Transit operations. In my case city transit including their light rail transit line, which should not be placed under Railroad for the same reason as above. These are under Transportation for me. Other places will have public transport that goes beyond a city such as a region or provincewide (or statewide) service and that too should not be under Railroad or Business.
- As I said above, construction, road maintenance, and other related services don't deserve to be clumped in with other Business agencies. I would also suggest that construction should be further broken up into road construction, building construction, and other similar breakdowns.
- Sports. There's a category for racing officials and racing teams, owing to the popularity of scanners at NASCAR and other motorsports events, and I agree with that. Where do you put the coach-to-quarterback headsets at football games? Business? I don't think so... for me, I've used up another Custom tag. All kinds of sports use radio comms these days and there should be service tags for many of them.
- Another business which is often lumped into either Railroad or Business is intermodal yards ("sea cans"). I'm in a landlocked province so it's most often thrown into Railroad because that's where they're most often seen. However there are shipyards on coasts that have intermodal facilities, and trucking yards as well. In my case I've put them in Transportation, but that doesn't really fit well, since that tag already includes other things which aren't quite in the same category (such as buses and light rail). I'll probably end up eventually using a Custom tag for this.
- Speaking of shipyards - shipping and passenger/automotive ferries have to land in either Transportation or Business because there is no Marine category. Same with marine channels, which are thrown in Transportation in the full DB, but Transportation is beginning to become cluttered just like Business is.
- CB, FRS, GMRS, and etc is currently categorized as "Other" in the full DB. Not entirely an accurate description.
- Radio communications used at post-secondary institutions (college, university) in specialized disciplines such as scientific facilities, medical centers, etc are listed as "Schools" which is not particularly useful.
For those of you saying "all aeronautical MUST BE tagged Aircraft" and similar assertions - nothing at all "must be" done in any fashion whatsoever. If I want to write my favorites list with control towers as Emergency Ops and ground maintenance crews as Transportation, that's my choice, and I'd love to see how you plan to stop me.
I'm pretty confident that bidulock was soliciting opinions on how to assign types in favorites lists, not how to post things into the database. How the service tags are used in the RR database is of very little concern in this situation except that if he uses, say, Transportation for tow trucks in his FLs, and continues to monitor the full DB as well as his FLs, he wants to know what other stuff he's going to be hearing in addition to his desired comms. It'd be nice to be able to filter the full DB on the website by service tag, so you could review what all is contained within each tag in a given county or subcat.
