New KSFO Frequency / 124.25

[b52hbuff]

I heard a new frequency at KSFO during the POTUS arrival. KSFO was shut down as AF1 approached and all planes were advised to stay in their locations on the field. As AF1 taxied to its ramp area, the tower and ground controllers told aircraft that there was going to be up to a one hour delay. It was a bit entertaining to hear the grousing and confusion. Some aircraft said their batteries wouldn't last that long. Others were calling into their control centers asking what would happen to their monitoring programs (e.g. engine monitoring) if they shut an engine.

...anyway, the aircraft were all instructed to monitor 124.25, which was referred to as "Gate hold".

Has anyone ever heard this? I looked on AirNav and googled it, and didn't find much detail. Looks like another ground control frequency.

 

[kma371]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3GS: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)

It's been in the DB

 

[lbfd09]

And I thought KSFO was 5-6-0 AM, where I listened to Lon Simmons and Russ Hodges call the Giants Baseball games over the Golden West Network. That was in between the Don Sherwood and Dan Sorkin shows.

 

[b52hbuff]

It's been in the DB

Thanks. Do you know how it got there? Was it monitored or was it in a reference I missed?

I'm curious to know how a pilot would come to get this frequency? If there is a better aviation resource than airnav or google, I'd like to see if there are more "new" frequencies to pick up.

 

[LAflyer]

In all my airline station guides I have 124.25 listed as an KSFO clearance frequency.

Also if you Google SFO+124.25 you'll get a bunch of hits including ACARS intercepts so it appears to have been a KSFO frequency for quite some time.

 

[inigo88]

It is the alternate ground control frequency. It is only given out by the ground controller on 121.8, that's why you don't see it listed on airnav or other aeronautical charting sources. There would be no point in them publishing a frequency belonging to a position which is unstaffed the majority of the time. Besides being used for gate hold (aka "metering" at some other airports) I have heard it given out as a discreet for ARFF to talk to emergency aircraft. I was probably the one that submitted it a long time ago.

 

[Radiobern]

Here's another unpublished frequency, 128.65. Very rarely used, I heard them using this as an alternate tower frequency many moths ago. They were having difficulty with 120.5 and had planes switch over to 128.65 while the issue was being resolved. Both ground and approach advised aircraft to switch to 128.65 during this time. This lasted for a good two to three hours before they resumed normal operations on 120.5.