700 MHz D Block wish comes true for public safety

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kf4lhp

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The big thing here is there's no longer the give-back for the narrowband portion of 700 MHz which would have been true insanity.
 

radioman2001

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What insanity, this is what I have been saying needs to be done for years. You want interoperability make it a nationwide system, paid for by Fed funds. That's how every one ended up on VHF (in the countryside) and UHF (cities) in the 70's, it was public money that did that, not some Chief of Police or local government. LTE may not be the cure all, but that combined with the 700 narrow band freqs gives Public Safety the option to do what ever they need to do with today's technolgies and what ever may come down in the future.
Maybe at some distant future time old frequencies will have to be given back, but not anything that I am likely to see. It's more likely that when a 700 mhz system comes to maturity, no one will be on the old legacy channels anyway.
 

cg

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How will this turn out differently from the failed IWN federal agency system? The companies smell federal money, they all claim to be able to solve everyones problems with a single system and then it doesn't work. So then come the add-on contracts to make it work, additional coverage, maintenance, etc, etc.

chris
 

ipfd320

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yah here we go again..another waste of time and money...whats this deal gonna take and time line to completion / aspect 2-now we have to get a billion radios for fd/pd and god knows who else...there in its self alone is gonna be more than 7-billion right there...yep a WASTE of TAXPAYERS MONEY...not only that we the community wont be able to get it on our scanning recievers if it does go live in the future
 
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missionmankind

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What does this mean?

So what does this article mean for us who are just getting into buying a GRE PSR-500 or 800?

Does this entail some kind of BAD or negative change in scanner monitoring?

Hopefully not, because im just about to buy a digital scanner for almost $400 bucks :/
 

DickH

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READ ALL ABOUT IT.
This was on the daily Western Fire Chief's newsletter.

Daily Dispatch - Emerging Issues - Congress Gives the D Block to Public Safety

If you don't want to read all the BS and hype, here is the crux of the matter. Note a new bureaucratic authority in the Dept. of Commerce will run it. Won't that be great.

About the Temporary Payroll Tax Cut Continuation Act of 2011
Here is a summary of the provisions included in Title IV of the conference report:

-The D Block will be allocated to public safety.

-Governance of the network by a new First Responder Network Authority will be within
the National Telecommunications and Information Administration of the Dept. of Commerce.

-Incentive auctions will provide $7 billion for construction of the network.

-In approximately 11 years, public safety organizations will be required to give back spectrum currently in use in the T Band. The agreement includes provisions to pay for their relocation to the 700 MHz band.
 
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missionmankind

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?confused?

Please forgive me, Im a noob to a lot of this, especially this article.

What does this mean for us beginners who are buying expensive digital scanners for monitoring public safety?
Will this D-Block allocation for public safety render our digital scanners useless for monitoring?

Inotherwords, break this down for me in a 1st grade level for new scanner hobbyists. And when is this supposed to begin?

Thanks for your patience :)
 

2wayfreq

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D-Block is the frequency range of 758-763MHz to be used for DATA. It has nothing to do with voice channels which are 764-774.
 

902

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Please forgive me, Im a noob to a lot of this, especially this article.

What does this mean for us beginners who are buying expensive digital scanners for monitoring public safety?
Will this D-Block allocation for public safety render our digital scanners useless for monitoring?

Inotherwords, break this down for me in a 1st grade level for new scanner hobbyists. And when is this supposed to begin?

Thanks for your patience :)
For the short term, this doesn't mean anything. The "D Block" is a data system. HOWEVER, voice, data, and video can ride over a data system. "Industry" and certain aggressive investors have been hawking this because they envision that virtually everything related to public safety will ride on it in rather short order. Some say 5 years, others say 15 years. The reality is that's the direction things are headed in, but no one knows exactly how fast. The skunkworks probably have beta units locked away already.

With the exception of the T-Band "giveback", the other bands should remain more or less intact. Unfortunately, T-Band is the workhorse of all spectrum and the regions where it's allotted rely very heavily on it for relief because virtually everything else was occupied. If you wanted to map out the coverage of each licensee on it and plot that against population density, you would find that T-Band serves a tremendous population. Nonetheless, it all will go away first and the braintrust (mostly one dominant agency within each region) will build out a D-Block system while the others go running to figure out how they'll backfill the void and how to pay for the equipment they'll have to toss into the dumpster, thanks to Congress and proponents. This is ALL taxpayer money that's going to the dump with relatively new T-Band trunked and conventional systems, by the way.

The truth is there will never be "enough" broadband spectrum because we are undisciplined users. There are grandiose promises that this is the be-all/end-all of public safety, when it can't even talk from one side of the wall to another without going through infrastructure. There are visions that everyone will be streaming video from everything. Who will process the volumes of information and spot the diamond hidden in a desert? And, it's ONLY 5 MHz (none of this 10 MHz BS, half of it is paired input). The applications will be bandwidth hogs and eventually, probably sooner than later, we'll need more. Then what?

Getting off my soapbox, the other frequencies should be unaffected for now. By the time the early adopters start changing, your scanner will have some good mileage on it. So, enjoy the hobby while you can. You are getting into something that, at some point in your life, you can consider having been magic.
 

sepura

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The same thing that happens to eveything that we have now.

I am assuming all voice COMMS will be encrypted on this network? Will it be a trunking system for the whole US? It seems crazy to me that they expect to fit ALL public safety in the whole US on one band...
 

Thunderknight

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? And, it's ONLY 5 MHz (none of this 10 MHz BS, half of it is paired input).

Actually it IS 10 MHz up and another 10 MHz down. It's 5up/5down D-Block, plus the existing 5up/5down public safety broadband block under the PSST control.

It seems crazy to me that they expect to fit ALL public safety in the whole US on one band...

Most likely it would be cellular in nature. Remember, cell companies have millions of subscribers in a few 10s of MHz. Traffic is not simulcast, it's only present on cells where there is a party to the call.
The same spectrum is reused over and over from cell to cell, with the coverage overlaps carefully engineered. So NYC public safety wouldn't be carried on cell sites in Los Angles (unless it was configured to permit that for roaming).
 

nd5y

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It is supposed to be a LTE network.
No scanner will ever be able to receive it. Just like with the cellular networks plus the users will probably be able to access NCIC, etc. so it will have to be encrypted.
 
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