i have a question
what was the cause of the decline of lowband?
A book could easily be written on that. It's not that manufacturers stopped building the equipment, though, it's the market changed.
was it the manufactures sales folks running about telling folks how much better highband/uhf is?
Maybe. More predictable coverage, more efficient hand held radios, small antennas, etc. Salesmen are always going to try and separate customers from their money, at any and all means possible.
or did they out right lie and say that there would not be any narrow band Low band radios
so everybody had to buy new radios and licences ?
Low band was not impacted by narrow banding. However, that wouldn't have stopped some sales guys from telling customers that. I don't think there was any big change as a result of narrow banding related to low band use. Decline has been happening for a while, well before 2013.
i still see ALOT of issued licences in the database and quite a bit of activity up and down the band
It is still in use, that's for sure.
A couple of things, though:
-A valid license doesn't mean it's still in use. Sometimes licenses get renewed by admin people who have no idea what they are doing. They just pay it every 10 years.
-Sometimes agencies will hang on to old frequencies, "just in case". Sometimes the guys who run the systems forget to tell the people that renew the licenses to stop.
-The other issue is that hobbyists often will say the band is dead, when in reality they are trying to use unsuitable antennas and therefore not hearing anything. Most stock scanner antennas have abysmal performance on low band. It really requires a dedicated antenna to work well.
i was thinking of getting a allocation myself just to give all those almost free 42mhz radios something to do
I've considered it too, however I don't really have a need at this time. There are some low band itinerant channels.
Also, many of these radios can easily be stretched up to 6 meters pretty easily.
