Fire Pager Rebanding

[bpdkop21]

Just heard that the whole rebanding issue is going to effect fire & ems paging systems. I am reporting this based on third-party info, so don't take it as gospel. Word is that by 2013 we have to change our pagers to narrow-band spacing, then by 2018 all pagers will be using the very-narrow-band spacing. This is going to cost some money because we still have several Minitor 4's that can't do narrow-band. So, we have to buy new pagers just to junk all of them in 5 years. I don't understand why the FCC can't just let agencies have a freq or two remain unchanged for paging puposes. Any thoughts?

 

[GTR8000]

Just to clarify, "rebanding" (the shuffling around of users in the 800 MHz spectrum) has nothing to do with "narrowbanding" (the change from 25 kHz to 12.5 kHz channel width in the VHF High and UHF/UHF-T spectrums).

Now as far as the pagers themselves, the non-narrowband capable models generally still work fine on 12.5 kHz wide channels, but the audio is a little lower. In any case, Minitor V's are 12.5 kHz narrowband compliant, which means they are viable until at least 2018 at which point the move to 6.25 kHz is supposed to go into effect. I'm not sure where you got the "So, we have to buy new pagers just to junk all of them in 5 years" idea from, but a Minitor V purchased today will be fine for at least the next 8 years.