My family and I were in the Pisgah National Forest earlier this week. Everything that I have found so far lists this area as analog FM. Certainly this is possible, but with so many places switching to APCO P25, I have to strongly suspect that this has happened here, too. Can anybody with experience monitoring this area comment or suggest an area with further information?
Pisgah National Forest
- Thread starter JASII
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As I understand it he wasn't asking about a National Park Service frequency with a repeater on Mt. Pisgah, he was asking about monitoring the Pisgah National Forest.
Jasii, on the page linked by KE4ZNR, scroll down toward the bottom of the page where you will find frequency information for the Pisgah NF. The National Park Service (NPS) seems to be converting to digital more quickly than the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) (Dept. of Agriculture) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) (Dept. of the Interior) (an unknown agency to easterners). The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) (Dept. of the Interior) has converted a few of their systems to digital. It appears as though the Department of the Interior is making an effort to convert to digital, while the U.S. Forest Service doesn't seem to be headed in that direction. The USFS and the BLM cover larger areas than the NPS and USFWS do in the lower 48 states and digital tends to reduce the coverage of repeaters and mobile to mobile coverage. The conversion to narrowband analog required an increase in repeaters and narrowband digital compounds the problem.
I'm not aware of the USFS converting a system to digital, however, I've heard rumors that a couple of National Forests in the southeast may be doing so. I think the Pisgah, Nantahala or Cherokee National Forests may have been one of them. I don't have any contacts in the east that can verify that. If the Forest Service was starting to convert to digital it makes sense that they would try it in the east where National Forests are much smaller than they are in the west, in addition to having less rugged topography.
As far as your ability to hear digital transmissions, it depends on what model scanner you are using. If it is one of the latest scanners capable of digital reception you won't need to do anything more than program the correct frequencies in it. If a digital signal is received it will sound a bit tinny, rather than the more natural sounding analog signal. If you don't have a digital scanner a digital signal will sound like open squelch on steroids. That is, it will have a more aggressive grating or annoying sound than open squelch.
I don't have any additional frequency information for the Pisgah NF or any other National Forests in the area. It has been 31 years since I traveled on the Pisgah and the Blue Ridge Parkway where the reception of both NPS and USFS radio systems was quite good. I was on a temporary duty assignment for the USFS on the Pisgah at time and was working quite hard, leaving me little time to listen to a scanner.
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