Over the years I have applied for and received many different FCC licenses for myself, my work and friends. In the old days we had to use the infamous “Form 601”, a paper form used for most land-mobile license applications. The first time I used the 601 was for my GMRS license back in the late 1980’s. At the time GMRS was limited to 1 or 2 channel pairs and one had to include each of the radio types they had and for what frequencies. These radio types typically included mobiles (MOB), portables (PORT), Base (FB), Control Stations (FX1) and repeaters (FB2).
Most of us did not have repeaters but even without that it was a challenge to remember to include everything. We had a guy who owned the repeater we used that was an expert in filling out the 601 so that made things easier. He also had a special plastic ruler device that helped figure out geographic coordinates in the days before GPS and Google Maps. We had to include the station locations for the FB’s and FX1’s. You needed to get ahold of the USGS Sectional map for the area and use that special ruler device to figure out the coordinates. These maps also had the elevations, which was required. These days you grab the coordinates and elevation from your GPS, a smartphone or online.
These Sectional Maps were available by mail order from the USGS or, if you were lucky to have a Rand McNally store nearby, you could get one there. I did have a Rand McNally store about 15 minutes away, so I was able to get these maps easily. I still had some until I recently purged my garage of accumulated junk last year. I also bought the special ruler thing there as well. I probably still have it someplace.
These days all the licensing is done online. GMRS no longer requires such details as the frequencies desired, coordinates and elevations or even the station types. You just get a license, and you can have any type radios that are allowed for the service, from portables to full-power repeaters, and operate on any of the allowed frequencies.
Coordinated services like business band and public safety were a different animal altogether. Then, as it remains, you still fill out the form (then on paper, now online) and submit it to a Frequency Coordinator for your service type. Back then there was usually a single organization responsible for the frequencies assigned to that service. Police assignments were assigned by APCO, Fire by IMSA and Business by NABER. There were others for Rail, Forestry, Conservation, Highway and others. If no channels were available for your service type in your area you could try for an unused channel in another service type. When I needed a new channel for our fire department, I found a good candidate frequency in the Highway Maintenance Radio Service so I needed to work with both APCO and AASHTO, who coordinated Highway channels at the time. I eventually got the channel, but it was difficult and required twice the work.
Some years ago, the FCC changed things around. First, they eliminated a lot of the detailed Service Types for frequencies under 512 MHz. and set them in several “Pools”. Police (Type Code “PP”), Fire (PF), Local Government (PL), Conservation (PO), Highway Maintenance (PH), Special Medical (PS) and others were grouped into the “Public Safety Pool” (Type Code PW), most of the Business license types were also grouped together into a single pool (IB).
After these Services were grouped into the overall pools, the Frequency Coordinator system changed to where one could select one of several different ones to handle the coordination. I assume they have access to the FCC database at a minimum, perhaps there is some other database they use to coordinate among themselves. Regardless the competition has kept the fees down, I suspect they would have been much higher without the competition.
So, what do the Frequency Coordinators do and why do applicants have to pay them? They look over the application and make sure everything is in proper order, that existing users will not be impacted by a new license by providing “Safe Harbor” (Certain distances depending on power levels and elevations etc.) and even helping to select the frequencies needed if the applicant hasn’t already requested a specific one. They may ask the applicant to reduce the elevation, antenna gain or type or even the power output to prevent interference to other users or even require an applicant obtain “Letters of Concurrence” from users on the same frequency or adjacent ones that might be impacted. It is unusual for the FCC to request changes or deny an application after it goes thru coordination but it has happened.
While government agencies are exempt from FCC license fees, they still have to pay for coordination. When figuring out the budget for our new fire channel deployment I had to include the fees for coordination. Depending on the complexity it could range from a couple hundred dollars (for a single frequency and location) to several thousand (for multiple frequencies and locations. For my channel I had 5 base stations at different locations along with mobiles and portables and paid around $400 for coordination with APCO and AASHTO. These days I could have worked only with one of several different coordinators.
For a small agency like ours, as well as the larger communications coops we were members of, I was usually the guy that handled most of this stuff so I was pretty chummy with our local coordinators. APCO usually has a couple of coordinators per state and if you were close to the state border (we were 25 miles from the WI state line) you might have to deal with the other state’s guys as well. I knew both of the Illinois coordinators and the Wisconsin one as well so usually could get advice and consent easily as needed. Sometimes a phone call before submitting an application would result in some changes that would prevent an application being returned. Sometimes they would come to me with questions on other applications as they knew I had pretty decent knowledge of the local scene.
I was approached a couple times to see if I was interested in being an APCO or IMSA Coordinator but I already had too much on my plate so declined. I had no problem helping them out and they always took care of me.
When I got my ham license, also in the late 1980’s they were already using the VEC system. I took a class with a few friends, including a couple dispatchers, a radio tech and a radio reporter. We attended weekly classes held by a local ham club and learned theory and Morse Code. Code was still required then, 5 WPM for Novices and Techs and 13 for Generals. Most of us went for the Technician license and we all passed our tests. One guy passed his novice a week before the rest of us and then passed his tech on the final class with us, he made General soon thereafter. While most of us had calls very close to each other, his was actually quite a bit later than ours. Since he already had his Novice test passed, he had to wait for his license to arrive before he could present his exam results to upgrade so his call was later than ours.
Back to the pro side: All FCC license applications back then were done by mail. If you made a mistake, it could delay your license grant by weeks. The nice thing about the Coordination system was that they would usually catch a mistake before forwarding the application to the FCC. Often, they would call you on the phone to clarify or correct an issue, saving a week or two over mailing it back.
These days one can do all this stuff online. While the FCC website can be challenging in a good day it certainly is a lot easier now than it was. If no coordination is required, such as for a GMRS application or a simple renewal it only takes minutes. It is easier of course for governmental agencies as we do not need to pay for the license to the FCC. We did have to pay coordination fees however.
Even though I worked for the police department in our little town I handled the licenses for the other departments, including our Fire/EMS, Water, Electrical and Public Works Departments. I also handled the licenses for our police cooperative, which included about a dozen suburbs and helped out a couple of the neighboring towns for their Fire and Public Works licenses. As our coop had about a dozen T-Band (TV-Sharing on 470-512 MHz.) repeaters and each agency was licensed on several, I ended up being the Contact Person on more T-Band licenses than anyone else in the state outside of the City of Chicago. I think DuComm had more channels but less licenses as they were all licensed together instead of separately like ours.
When the whole T-Band takeaway debacle started I was front and center in the whole mess. This was a plan to move existing users off the T-Band channels and then auction off the spectrum to the highest bidder. It was doomed to fail for a few reasons, each of which I correctly predicted. First off, the spectrum was not nationwide, various chunks were available in specific markets and not others. For example, in the Chicago area we had TV Channels 14 and 15 (470-476 and 476-482 MHz) assigned to public safety and business use. Outside the Chicago area and the couple of other metro areas that had similar assignments, these were usually occupied by TV stations.
The scattered nature of these chunks of spectrum really reduced the value in them to commercial providers. Due to the probable low value of these allocations the promise that existing users would be paid to move elsewhere was a myth. I expected that we would never see a dime out of it.
Next, there was no provisions for accommodating T-Band users elsewhere, we would have to be squeezed into other spectrum. The whole reason we were using T-Band anyway was that there was no other place to put us, this would only make it worse.
Then there was the business users on T-Band, they were pretty well scattered around. Public Safety was nominally assigned to about a third of the available channels but not at the beginning or end of the band. After 40 years some freqs outside our allocations ended up licensed to government while the rest was assigned to business users. Since only the public safety allocations were to be taken (or at least promised to be paid to move, as hollow a promise that would be), what was to become of the business users? This would further erode the value of the spectrum.
Still another issue was narrow-banding. This was also happening at the same time. I was pretty certain that the whole T-Band thing would be nixed but by the time it was sprung upon us we were already knee-deep in narrow-banding. We were proactive in this; we didn’t want to wait until the end and have to be in a rush with all the other procrastinators so we jumped thru the hoops of modifying all our FCC licenses (well more “Me” instead of “We”) and then replacing some radios that were not capable of narrow-banding. Thankfully this was only a few and they were already up for replacement anyway. We also had to reprogram the mobile and portable radios as well as the repeaters, control stations and other base radios. We had to coordinate all this with not only the dozen or so towns in out police and fire coops but also the inter-op channels and coordinate with our mutual aid partners. Shortly after I signed off on paying our radio service a few dozen thousands of dollars we started hearing rumors that the FCC would exempt T-Band uses from narrow-banding. When that actually occurred, it was too late for us, we had completed our narrow-banding and would never get that money back.
The last thing I predicted was that the whole takeaway of the T-Band spectrum would be reversed, and it was. But by then many agencies spent a lot of money moving to different spectrum. In the Chicago area most went to the state StarCom21 system. While the various T-Band systems had been geared toward the specific coverage areas and tweaked locally to work well, the StarCom21 system was more generalized. If you wanted better coverage in your area, it would cost you dearly. While I had retired by then, our cooperative spent a good chunk of change to add a couple SC21 sites to provide for better local coverage, even with that it just does not work as well as the old UHF systems.
Thankfully in about some 50 years of public safety and hobby radio I never had an enforcement issue with the FCC. I minded my Ps and Qs so never got into trouble and most of the interference issues we had were resolved locally. There were a few ne’er-do-wells that would pop up on our channels from time to time. Usually, it was a one-off but a couple times we had some extended idiots that we tracked down. We got pretty good at localizing them by watching the repeater comparator panels and I was even able to prove that a specific radio we found on a suspect was the one used by viewing the waveform in Adobe Audition and comparing it to our radios and the interference we recorded. I don’t know if it would have held up in court, but it was good enough for the guy’s attorney to encourage a plea deal.
In the Chicago area the FCC had a Field Office in Park Ridge, a suburb of Chicago near O’Hare Airport. In the late 70’s and early 80’s I was a dispatcher and Service Officer for the police department there. Located in a non-descript office complex, the FCC had a public office, a small monitoring post and a garage for a couple mobile units. In the late 1970’s they had a mid-sized RV with a bunch of pretty esoteric radios from Collins, Motorola and Hallicrafters. They would usually park it in our police department parking lot when not in use and leave a set of keys at the desk. I was afraid to go explore the thing as I was still a teenager, but our radio guy had more guts and checked it out, inviting me to peek inside a couple times. By them I left that agency in the mid 80’s they had switched to Suburbans and built that garage out in the office park.
I spent many hours in the Field Office viewing the microfiche of licenses. We had a compatible fiche reader at work so they would give me the old cards when the new ones came in. That was a great way to stay awake on a lonely midnight shift.
I have already written about visiting the FCC Monitoring Posts at Grand Island NE and Allegan MI. At Park Ridge however, they would not let me see their facility outside the small public lobby. They had a couple prominent antennas on the top of the elevator shaft, including a couple discones and yagis. Later they had a small discone on the roof of the garage. As far as I know the antennas are still on the main building but the last time I looked the garage antenna was gone. I don’t know if they still use the office, monitoring facility or the garage anymore.
The FCC gets a lot of grief these days, the FCC database seems to be run on a Commodore 64. Who knows what is going to happen to it with the current administration’s “slash and burn” mentality.
Most of us did not have repeaters but even without that it was a challenge to remember to include everything. We had a guy who owned the repeater we used that was an expert in filling out the 601 so that made things easier. He also had a special plastic ruler device that helped figure out geographic coordinates in the days before GPS and Google Maps. We had to include the station locations for the FB’s and FX1’s. You needed to get ahold of the USGS Sectional map for the area and use that special ruler device to figure out the coordinates. These maps also had the elevations, which was required. These days you grab the coordinates and elevation from your GPS, a smartphone or online.
These Sectional Maps were available by mail order from the USGS or, if you were lucky to have a Rand McNally store nearby, you could get one there. I did have a Rand McNally store about 15 minutes away, so I was able to get these maps easily. I still had some until I recently purged my garage of accumulated junk last year. I also bought the special ruler thing there as well. I probably still have it someplace.
These days all the licensing is done online. GMRS no longer requires such details as the frequencies desired, coordinates and elevations or even the station types. You just get a license, and you can have any type radios that are allowed for the service, from portables to full-power repeaters, and operate on any of the allowed frequencies.
Coordinated services like business band and public safety were a different animal altogether. Then, as it remains, you still fill out the form (then on paper, now online) and submit it to a Frequency Coordinator for your service type. Back then there was usually a single organization responsible for the frequencies assigned to that service. Police assignments were assigned by APCO, Fire by IMSA and Business by NABER. There were others for Rail, Forestry, Conservation, Highway and others. If no channels were available for your service type in your area you could try for an unused channel in another service type. When I needed a new channel for our fire department, I found a good candidate frequency in the Highway Maintenance Radio Service so I needed to work with both APCO and AASHTO, who coordinated Highway channels at the time. I eventually got the channel, but it was difficult and required twice the work.
Some years ago, the FCC changed things around. First, they eliminated a lot of the detailed Service Types for frequencies under 512 MHz. and set them in several “Pools”. Police (Type Code “PP”), Fire (PF), Local Government (PL), Conservation (PO), Highway Maintenance (PH), Special Medical (PS) and others were grouped into the “Public Safety Pool” (Type Code PW), most of the Business license types were also grouped together into a single pool (IB).
After these Services were grouped into the overall pools, the Frequency Coordinator system changed to where one could select one of several different ones to handle the coordination. I assume they have access to the FCC database at a minimum, perhaps there is some other database they use to coordinate among themselves. Regardless the competition has kept the fees down, I suspect they would have been much higher without the competition.
So, what do the Frequency Coordinators do and why do applicants have to pay them? They look over the application and make sure everything is in proper order, that existing users will not be impacted by a new license by providing “Safe Harbor” (Certain distances depending on power levels and elevations etc.) and even helping to select the frequencies needed if the applicant hasn’t already requested a specific one. They may ask the applicant to reduce the elevation, antenna gain or type or even the power output to prevent interference to other users or even require an applicant obtain “Letters of Concurrence” from users on the same frequency or adjacent ones that might be impacted. It is unusual for the FCC to request changes or deny an application after it goes thru coordination but it has happened.
While government agencies are exempt from FCC license fees, they still have to pay for coordination. When figuring out the budget for our new fire channel deployment I had to include the fees for coordination. Depending on the complexity it could range from a couple hundred dollars (for a single frequency and location) to several thousand (for multiple frequencies and locations. For my channel I had 5 base stations at different locations along with mobiles and portables and paid around $400 for coordination with APCO and AASHTO. These days I could have worked only with one of several different coordinators.
For a small agency like ours, as well as the larger communications coops we were members of, I was usually the guy that handled most of this stuff so I was pretty chummy with our local coordinators. APCO usually has a couple of coordinators per state and if you were close to the state border (we were 25 miles from the WI state line) you might have to deal with the other state’s guys as well. I knew both of the Illinois coordinators and the Wisconsin one as well so usually could get advice and consent easily as needed. Sometimes a phone call before submitting an application would result in some changes that would prevent an application being returned. Sometimes they would come to me with questions on other applications as they knew I had pretty decent knowledge of the local scene.
I was approached a couple times to see if I was interested in being an APCO or IMSA Coordinator but I already had too much on my plate so declined. I had no problem helping them out and they always took care of me.
When I got my ham license, also in the late 1980’s they were already using the VEC system. I took a class with a few friends, including a couple dispatchers, a radio tech and a radio reporter. We attended weekly classes held by a local ham club and learned theory and Morse Code. Code was still required then, 5 WPM for Novices and Techs and 13 for Generals. Most of us went for the Technician license and we all passed our tests. One guy passed his novice a week before the rest of us and then passed his tech on the final class with us, he made General soon thereafter. While most of us had calls very close to each other, his was actually quite a bit later than ours. Since he already had his Novice test passed, he had to wait for his license to arrive before he could present his exam results to upgrade so his call was later than ours.
Back to the pro side: All FCC license applications back then were done by mail. If you made a mistake, it could delay your license grant by weeks. The nice thing about the Coordination system was that they would usually catch a mistake before forwarding the application to the FCC. Often, they would call you on the phone to clarify or correct an issue, saving a week or two over mailing it back.
These days one can do all this stuff online. While the FCC website can be challenging in a good day it certainly is a lot easier now than it was. If no coordination is required, such as for a GMRS application or a simple renewal it only takes minutes. It is easier of course for governmental agencies as we do not need to pay for the license to the FCC. We did have to pay coordination fees however.
Even though I worked for the police department in our little town I handled the licenses for the other departments, including our Fire/EMS, Water, Electrical and Public Works Departments. I also handled the licenses for our police cooperative, which included about a dozen suburbs and helped out a couple of the neighboring towns for their Fire and Public Works licenses. As our coop had about a dozen T-Band (TV-Sharing on 470-512 MHz.) repeaters and each agency was licensed on several, I ended up being the Contact Person on more T-Band licenses than anyone else in the state outside of the City of Chicago. I think DuComm had more channels but less licenses as they were all licensed together instead of separately like ours.
When the whole T-Band takeaway debacle started I was front and center in the whole mess. This was a plan to move existing users off the T-Band channels and then auction off the spectrum to the highest bidder. It was doomed to fail for a few reasons, each of which I correctly predicted. First off, the spectrum was not nationwide, various chunks were available in specific markets and not others. For example, in the Chicago area we had TV Channels 14 and 15 (470-476 and 476-482 MHz) assigned to public safety and business use. Outside the Chicago area and the couple of other metro areas that had similar assignments, these were usually occupied by TV stations.
The scattered nature of these chunks of spectrum really reduced the value in them to commercial providers. Due to the probable low value of these allocations the promise that existing users would be paid to move elsewhere was a myth. I expected that we would never see a dime out of it.
Next, there was no provisions for accommodating T-Band users elsewhere, we would have to be squeezed into other spectrum. The whole reason we were using T-Band anyway was that there was no other place to put us, this would only make it worse.
Then there was the business users on T-Band, they were pretty well scattered around. Public Safety was nominally assigned to about a third of the available channels but not at the beginning or end of the band. After 40 years some freqs outside our allocations ended up licensed to government while the rest was assigned to business users. Since only the public safety allocations were to be taken (or at least promised to be paid to move, as hollow a promise that would be), what was to become of the business users? This would further erode the value of the spectrum.
Still another issue was narrow-banding. This was also happening at the same time. I was pretty certain that the whole T-Band thing would be nixed but by the time it was sprung upon us we were already knee-deep in narrow-banding. We were proactive in this; we didn’t want to wait until the end and have to be in a rush with all the other procrastinators so we jumped thru the hoops of modifying all our FCC licenses (well more “Me” instead of “We”) and then replacing some radios that were not capable of narrow-banding. Thankfully this was only a few and they were already up for replacement anyway. We also had to reprogram the mobile and portable radios as well as the repeaters, control stations and other base radios. We had to coordinate all this with not only the dozen or so towns in out police and fire coops but also the inter-op channels and coordinate with our mutual aid partners. Shortly after I signed off on paying our radio service a few dozen thousands of dollars we started hearing rumors that the FCC would exempt T-Band uses from narrow-banding. When that actually occurred, it was too late for us, we had completed our narrow-banding and would never get that money back.
The last thing I predicted was that the whole takeaway of the T-Band spectrum would be reversed, and it was. But by then many agencies spent a lot of money moving to different spectrum. In the Chicago area most went to the state StarCom21 system. While the various T-Band systems had been geared toward the specific coverage areas and tweaked locally to work well, the StarCom21 system was more generalized. If you wanted better coverage in your area, it would cost you dearly. While I had retired by then, our cooperative spent a good chunk of change to add a couple SC21 sites to provide for better local coverage, even with that it just does not work as well as the old UHF systems.
Thankfully in about some 50 years of public safety and hobby radio I never had an enforcement issue with the FCC. I minded my Ps and Qs so never got into trouble and most of the interference issues we had were resolved locally. There were a few ne’er-do-wells that would pop up on our channels from time to time. Usually, it was a one-off but a couple times we had some extended idiots that we tracked down. We got pretty good at localizing them by watching the repeater comparator panels and I was even able to prove that a specific radio we found on a suspect was the one used by viewing the waveform in Adobe Audition and comparing it to our radios and the interference we recorded. I don’t know if it would have held up in court, but it was good enough for the guy’s attorney to encourage a plea deal.
In the Chicago area the FCC had a Field Office in Park Ridge, a suburb of Chicago near O’Hare Airport. In the late 70’s and early 80’s I was a dispatcher and Service Officer for the police department there. Located in a non-descript office complex, the FCC had a public office, a small monitoring post and a garage for a couple mobile units. In the late 1970’s they had a mid-sized RV with a bunch of pretty esoteric radios from Collins, Motorola and Hallicrafters. They would usually park it in our police department parking lot when not in use and leave a set of keys at the desk. I was afraid to go explore the thing as I was still a teenager, but our radio guy had more guts and checked it out, inviting me to peek inside a couple times. By them I left that agency in the mid 80’s they had switched to Suburbans and built that garage out in the office park.
I spent many hours in the Field Office viewing the microfiche of licenses. We had a compatible fiche reader at work so they would give me the old cards when the new ones came in. That was a great way to stay awake on a lonely midnight shift.
I have already written about visiting the FCC Monitoring Posts at Grand Island NE and Allegan MI. At Park Ridge however, they would not let me see their facility outside the small public lobby. They had a couple prominent antennas on the top of the elevator shaft, including a couple discones and yagis. Later they had a small discone on the roof of the garage. As far as I know the antennas are still on the main building but the last time I looked the garage antenna was gone. I don’t know if they still use the office, monitoring facility or the garage anymore.
The FCC gets a lot of grief these days, the FCC database seems to be run on a Commodore 64. Who knows what is going to happen to it with the current administration’s “slash and burn” mentality.
