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.