We are not understanding each other here. I can't figure out why you draw "radio zones" that are different from the district boundaries of the New Mexico State Police. For example you show, by using the color tan, that D8 extends into Socorro County, shown in blue. This extension into Socorro County shows a curved line that is more than half way across (east-west) the county. It is the drawing of this curved line that I don't understand. I don't see anything in the license data indicating that this curved line should be drawn. I don't understand the term "radio zone." I've not seen the term used before. As far as I know, radio frequency use corresponds with district boundaries and districts are not split up between two dispatch centers.
The FCC license data for KRO437 shows a remote base station on Socorro Mountain, just west of the town of Socorro, on 155.580. This mountain is on the state's microwave linking backbone. The western boundary of D11 (Socorro District) is the Arizona state line. D11 also has remote bases on Davenport Peak (northwest of the town of Datil), Magnus Mountain (south of Quemado) and Caballo Peak (south of Truth or Consequences). Those four locations provide coverage for the entire district. Interestingly enough, the license for Caballo Peak shows a control point of Santa Fe.
I lived in Magdalena, 27 miles west of Socorro and worked on the southernmost portions of the Cibola National Forest, these portions being 4 land areas that are located in Socorro, Catron and Sierra Counties. I drove to and within those 4 land areas several times per week with a scanner in the USFS truck. Of the four remote bases I regularly heard 3 of them and know that Socorro, not Santa Fe, dispatches the Sierra County portion of D11. My position with the Cibola National Forest included the administration of special use permits and electronic sites are authorized by this type of permit. I had access to a lot of data and understood how the systems worked. The FCC licenses are the same as they were when I was there.
The license data shown in the RR database have some bugs. Sometimes data from other licenses gets included on the license data you are viewing. I don't pay much attention to license listing in RR database, I just use it to link quickly to the actual FCC license data. The FCC license does not always reflect reality either. Even though Socorro uses Caballo Peak, the license shows a control point in Santa Fe. This is not unusual as licenses, of which the State of New Mexico has approximately 835, can contain authorization duplications and mistakes. The people in charge of overseeing a communications system might see that the authorization for a particular electronic site for one frequency may have expired so they tack it on another license application that is about to be sent in. The result might be that an application for renewal is about to go in that covers D8 headquarted in Alamogordo and a remote base up near Raton is found to have an expired license or is newly installed and there is a problem with the license that was supposed to have been issued, even though the APCO coordination was completed. They might add that to the Alamogordo application quickly, not really needing to worry if it is on the correct license, but that it has an authorization somewhere. I don't see this much in the licenses for California, but New Mexico is a different place and was more prone to errors when I lived there. Bottom line, you can't take the control point listed on a license as the dispatch location for a given electronic site and frequency.
One other possibility is a dispatch center having the frequencies of adjacent districts shown on its own license. With microwave linking one dispatch center might be able to work the radio network for another district in case the other dispatch center has a failure due to a power outage or a disaster event. The NMSP headquarters in Santa Fe might have the ability to work every district network in the state for the same reasons.
I've written all of this just in case you have concluded, based on the control points shown on the FCC licenses, that a dispatch center in an adjacent district actually dispatches a portion of another district. If that is not how you drew these radio zones, then I'm at a loss as to how you drew these lines.
The repeater near Santa Fe is, as I indicated, the only one used by the New Mexico State Police as far as I know. The RR database listing shows a repeater being used in D7 in Taos County, but when you click on the license you find only fixed bases (FB) listed and if you access the actual FCC license you find the same. There are two possibilities, one the site is not a repeater, or two, it is a repeater that RR members have heard and state communications personnel forgot to change the FB listings to FB2 on their latest applications relative to that license, didn't want to bother with the as the input and output frequencies are already licensed or it got mixed up in the shuffle of administering 835 licenses.
I did not mean to flame you or use harsh words in my prior post and when I reread my previous post I don't see where I did that. I was asking direct questions of how you determined what a "radio zone" is. As you replied "I developed the map using the data in the RR wiki database" and did not mention specifics, I had to guess how to address that and did so above.
The database shows listings for Channels 1,2 and 4. As for Channel 3, my guess would be that the district frequency pair is programmed in that channel. Since the other channels are not the district channel I think it is a good guess.
I hope this helps sir. Again I'm hoping someone that live in New Mexico will weigh in on these issues. We are both living quite some distance from New Mexico and the observations of locals would be quite valuable.
