mikeh said:
Couple more freqs from San Diego
168.775 Command Repeater, full scale
171.5375 "there is a big flare up on the back of the ridge" Referred to as "air-to-ground"
415.225 talk about surveying the road again, "on Admin Net Tone 5", probably relay for Cleveland NF
168.775 Command Repeater is not listed as NFIC or BLM
this is new freqs what kind of traffic are you hearing
this could be intesting
Somehow I missed this thread during all the action. Now I'm laying on the couch feeling punky and the temperature outside might get above freezing today, so I'm not anxious to get up and do much. I'm getting my first comprehensive look at RR in months.
Lots of good information in these lists. This is one of those RR threads I'm going to print and refer to when I'm around large incidents in the near future. I can no longer get frequency information through the Forest Service like I used to as it is now labeled "for official use only." That is now being defined in such a manner that retired employees like myself, who logged 5500 hours on wildland fire incidents (about 2.5 working years), are excluded from "official use." I'm now forced to grovel around in search mode like everyone else, snivel, snivel. Since the narrow band/digital capable requirements for new radios in the federal government were put in place in 2005 lots of new air to ground, tactical, and command frequencies have been popping up. As I understand it the first seven command, tactical, and logistics frequencies are still fixed and have not changed. As far as I know anything that is mentioned as command, tactical, and logistics 8 and above are assigned to incidents based on need, available frequencies, and use by other agencies and incidents. This is similar to the long standing procedure of assigning unique air to air frequencies from an annual list of frequencies given the 11 Geographical Coordination Centers such as "South Ops" by the FAA and assigned to individual incidents by those centers. I would bet that they just call them "Command 8" and etc. just to distinguish them from the other seven programmed into all the field radios on a full time basis. I would suspect there is not a permanent list that shows a Command 8, 9 or above, but I could be wrong on this. I took a look at the program of a new digital radio assigned to a current Forest Service employee friend of mine and it only had the first seven, so this is one reason I think anything from 8 and above is a temporary situation. The downside to this is that every radio brought from a home unit to an incident has to be programmed with these 8 and above frequencies rather than dialed in by arriving units, which is something the larger memory radios were eliminating.
As for the use of 415.550, this is the down link for most National Air Guard remote bases in California. The up link would be 9 MHz's lower or 406.550. I'm not sure if all the remote bases have the up link repeated on the down link, a practice that used to be fairly standard before the big system replacement work done after the 2005 narrow band mandate.
Those are some general comments and now for some specifics.
168.775 is in use by the Forest Service all over the country for use on individual National Forests. It is the Fire Net on the Sequoia National Forest, the Forest Net on the Tahoe NF, and the input to the Forest Net on the Prescott NF in Arizona. There are more but these are the closest. Is the Forest Service pulling a CDF and recycling their Forest (local) nets for use as commands and tacticals in other areas? This would make sense as they usually get exclusive assignments of their frequencies for the U.S. or at least west of the Mississippi.
168.300 is the BLM's California "Scene of Action" frequency. It isn't a "new" frequency or something unique to fires in the San Bernardino Mountains. They were probably using it as a tactical on an incident there because it is already programmed into almost every wildland fire radio in California.
163.100 and 168.350 are shared frequencies for the entire federal government. Federal wildland fire management agencies do not have an exclusive assignment for them. They are sometimes called (officially) the federal government's "wide area itinerant frequencies."
168.550 used to be the BLM's air net, something that the 168.625 National Air Guard used to be called. During the first part of my career air net was used for everything, air to ground, air to air, air dispatch, flight following, and even as an intercom between nearby National Forests. The BLM had a similar setup. Now 168.550 is often referred to as "ICS call-up" or an initial contact frequency for units arriving on an interagency incident. It is also used as an air to ground for smoke jumpers, be they BLM or Forest Service.
173.9125, 173.9625, and 173.9875 were assigned as tacticals for the Forest Service in Region 5 (Pacific Southwest Region of the USFS) sometime in the 90's or maybe late 80's. As Tacs 4-7 did not exist as such in the NIFC cache radios at the time they were given these numbers. Once the commands, tacs, and logistical frequencies of the BLM and USFS were combined to form the National Incident Radio Support Cache Tacs 4-7 came into existence. Now these are called R5 Tacs 4-6. It would make more sense to call them R5 Tacs 1-3 now as calling them Tacs 4-6 could imply that there are an additional three called R5 Tacs 1-3 right now, but what would I know.
172.350 is a simplex, mobile, and tactical frequency assigned to the Los Padres National Forest. I think they were given this and 170.475 years ago to construct a second repeater net on that Forest, but decided they needed a couple of simplex frequencies somewhat unique to that Forest more than they needed a second repeater net. I always maintained that every Forest needed a Forest Net that everyone stayed on during average conditions, and an Admin Net for units to have more extended conversations on such as wilderness rangers and recreation personnel calling a ranger station or each other for weather information, recreation conditions, road and trail conditions; and the like. In addition I think they should also have a "fire command net" to be able to switch fire units to during multiple start conditions such as lightning storms so they don't have to take over the Forest net. But the people on the Los Padres didn't even seem to want a second net, so I guess my view of the situation is not widespread.
166.675 is National FM Air to Air Tactics 1.
You may hear air to air, air to ground, and command traffic on one of the Logistics frequencies. The logistical portable UHF repeaters are frequently used as links between command repeaters and to extend the range of VHF aviation frequencies (123.075 and similar). In my own fire experience I've heard them used to extend the coverage for incident helibases on 123.075 more than any other use. I've also been on some very large fires where one portion of the fire was on one command channel, say Command 1, and another portion of the fire was on Command 3, this being necessary due to the size of the fire and its topography, in addition to having some areas of overlapping coverage between repeaters on each command. They wanted everyone on each channel to hear all the same traffic, so they used UHF repeaters to cross band link the two VHF repeaters so that traffic on either repeater would be heard by both VHF repeaters. Once an incident grows large enough to employ two or more Type I incident teams, with an Area Command Team in charge of the entire fire, each team usually is in charge of a particular "zone" on the fire and each zone has their own command channel. The thing that should be remembered is that the Logistic net frequencies can be employed for all sorts of purposes. Traffic on the Logistic net on an incident is usually not very heavy and the repeaters don't have to be located in a real high location that interferes with other incidents leaving the 7 Logistic channels open for all sorts of interesting uses.
This is one of the best monitoring reports I've seen for a large incident and group of incidents. If enough people do this over the upcoming years we might be able to see common information from year to year to determine if there are permanent assignments for some of these newly assigned frequencies. When state and local agencies are required to use narrow band we are really going to see a lot of new stuff appearing overnight. APCO frequency coordination lists and the FCC database are already starting to show some, but around 2013 (the current narrow band required date I believe) we are going to be caught flat footed unless we prepare.
