Any Low Band in La?

Is there any low band activity in La anymore?

I can stare at Winradio screen for hours. The only thing I detect are some blips around 46 Mhz which I think is railroad data.

Anyone?

Tom
Lafayette

46/49 Mhz might be the old Cordless phones and baby monitors.

In certain areas of the US, LOW Band is still very active, especially Business Band.

R7000 said:

Is there any low band activity in La anymore?

I can stare at Winradio screen for hours. The only thing I detect are some blips around 46 Mhz which I think is railroad data.

Anyone?

Tom
Lafayette

Click to expand...

I don't actually know of any. If there is, it is very little. Virtually everybody has gotten on the LWIN wagon. There are a few holdouts on VHF high and UHF, but you probably already knew this. I've noticed in Mississippi that all the new H.P. vehicles no longer have low band or vhf antenna. I did a double take on one I saw the other day and unless it has a stealth vhf antenna hidden on it, all I could see was a single 700 antenna on the roof.. Anyway, as far as P.S. in La, low band is basically kaput.

FCC this am, is having issues, try searching 25-50 Mhz in LA, later today
http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/General_Me...ortstring=,+lic_name,+file_num&limit_select=4

I see most of the Replies are focusing on Public Safety, however there is likely plenty of Business and Military still in use.

R7000 said:

Is there any low band activity in La anymore?

I can stare at Winradio screen for hours. The only thing I detect are some blips around 46 Mhz which I think is railroad data.

Anyone?

Tom
Lafayette

Click to expand...

No, not that I can see

Hi there,

None that I can see. 25 years or so ago 39.5mhz was very active. It was the statewide lowband simplex
channel, and some small towns such as Sunset seemed to use it as primary dispatch.

Back when I active in the LFT EOC some years ago, I can recall seeing only about one functioning lowband
radio, and that was at the comms desk for the national guard. There may be still some small national guard
unit sometimes active at the old depot near the airport, but I'm not sure. I know its not as busy as it used to be,
and not sure if they use someting digital you could never receive. IMHO best bet of catching anything low band
here scan military helo frequencies. Last lowband I received here was LEO out of missouri.

Regards

KB5UDF->W5JAB

There is some activity on the 6 Meter ham band. But that too is not that active. There are some SSB activity on nets down on the low end of 6 meters on set days of the week. This will vary with location.

You can hear distant 6 meter repeaters now and then. Many of the local 6 meter repeaters have been taken down due to the noise floor going so high with all the cable TV leakage and the noise coming from many CAT5 devices leaking signals.

Here are the Current FCC Licenses for Low Band in LA
25-30 Mhz
30-40 Mhz
40-50 Mhz

Apparently the 25-50 Mhz Search by itself is so large the FCC site kept timing out.

Follow Up

I did license search for lafayette parish, only 8 hits! And from my actual observation these are mostly just
zombies, with no real use. For example the sheriff is licensed for 100 or more low band units, but they
haven't had low band ants on their cars for years. Furgo Chance, I work near there, I don't see a bunch of low band either.

The one license I see remaining for LFT parish comm district, is 46.58, which I'm about 90% certain was the frequency stamped
on that old Moto. base station for National Guard in the EOC.


The one thing that is still in use is Red Cross on 47mhz(47.24 FM if memory serves) or so and there was some activity during the flood, but day to day probably quiet unless they are doing training.

In short most of the actual low band users (utilities and oilfield) migrated to 800/900 or cell many years ago.

Regarding 6 meters, there is a simplex net, that I checked into as recently as a year ago, I think net control is out of Walker, LA. It is on a weeknight and they do FM then SSB.

Regards

W5JAB

Those Lafayette Parish low band licenses might be old licenses that they just keep renewing without stopping to think about what they are doing. I remember back in the 80's and into the early 90's every Laf Parish S.O. unit had a low band radio with about three channels - F-1 was the statewide simplex 39.5 which was an early form of interoperability, F-2 was 39.72 MHz and was mainly used by civil division, and then there was one frequency for the LORAN-C tracking system they used in the years before GPS. In the communications room at the S.O. there was a monitor with a map of the parish and it showed the location of all the patrol units equipped with the LORAN-C. Those transmitted at about 100 watts from a long whip antenna located next to the trunk lid. They used VHF Hi on 155.655 for patrol dispatch. Even when they implemented the 800MHz Motorola Type I trunked system circa 1989 they still kept the low band radios in the cars. All that has been done away with now and I haven't heard any traffic on those frequencies in over 20 years. I no longer have access to the S.O.'s comm center (and haven't for many years) so I can't say if they even still have the low band freqs on their consoles but when I worked for Lafayette PD in the early 90's I know that they did not have any low band freqs at all, not even the statewide 39.5. Laf PD at that time had only the 800 MHz Moto trunked system that all agencies in the parish shared.

I worked in Michigan for a time and could hear skip from Louisiana on 39.5. It was amazing to hear people you know

cajunjerry said:

I worked in Michigan for a time and could hear skip from Louisiana on 39.5. It was amazing to hear people you know

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Back in the 70's I used to hear a lot of that on the 39 mhz stuff that EBR had.

I was thinking again this morning about the low band LORAN-C tracking system that Lafayette SO used to use. I remember a couple of times on a slow night shift we drove into an empty metal warehouse type building to see if it would mess with the VTS (vehicle tracking system.) I called the dispatcher and asked for my location on VTS and she gave me a location that was several miles away. We drove out of the building and laughed at the thought of the dispatcher watching the screen and seeing our position suddenly jump halfway across the parish and thinking, "What!? How'd you get there so fast?"

Many agencies in north LA (at least back when I lived there) had written policies to keep their old VHF-Low (generally on 39.5) licensed and working as a backup system as well as a form of inter-agency communication. There was even scheduled tests where the agencies would pick up the old mics (or more often, press the button on their consoles) at the designated time and announce their call sign and location. It was almost never used for real activities, just the tests and when things got boring an occasional transmission stating something like "is everyone else as bored as I am". Now that most have moved to LWIN, the documents have probably been rewritten to eliminate the lowband systems and many have probably been removed, but some are probably still there, just never used.

Washington Sain Tammany Electric 37.48, 37.82

Washington Saint Tammany Electric Coop used 37.48, 37.82 occasionally.

E B R SO, was on low band until 1990. They went to 800 at that time. I worked in communications at EBR , from August of 82 until January of 84.

We would always get Fairfax County, VA. And Cuyahoga County Oh. On our radioes. And Los Angeles County SD. Too

red8 said:

E B R SO, was on low band until 1990. They went to 800 at that time. I worked in communications at EBR , from August of 82 until January of 84.

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Then I was listening to you. I used to hang out with friends at Central Sub back then

Our MissLou ham club have our 6 meter repeater going now.
Downlink 53.8300
Uplink: 52.8300
Offset: -1.0 MHz
Uplink Tone: 107.2
Downlink Tone: 107.2

It's in Jackson Louisiana which it about 25 miles north of Baton Rouge.

Our 2 meter repeater is linked to it so you'll hear both

2 meter repeater is.

Downlink 146.8350
Uplink: 146.2350
Offset: -0.6 MHz
Uplink Tone: 114.8

We have a 2 meter net every Wed. night at 8pm so tune in and if you're a ham feel free to check it and you'll hear both the 6 & 2 meter repeaters.