FCC Radio Services

[JASII]

Some years back, the FCC radios services seemed pretty structured. More recently, it seems like some frequencies are all over the place. For example, 155.595 was Police, 154.445 was Fire and 155.880 was Local Government.

Has the FCC allowed any other uses on the media frequencies from 450 to 450.9875 and 455 to 455.9875?

It seems like those are still protected for the media. Or, has anybody seem any non-media users on those?

 

[nd5y]

450-451/455-456 MHz are Part 74 broadcast auxiliary frequencies. FCC doesn't generally allow other services there.
Usually private land mobile radio is only allowed to used the channels listed in 90.20 (public safety pool) and 90.35 (industrial business pool).

The FCC did away with the separate radio services for police, fire, local government, taxi, etc. and combined them all into the public safety pool and industrial/business pool in the mid or late 1990s.

 

[ofd8001]

As you noted, there was a time where frequencies were pretty service specific. Then the needs outgrew the availability of frequencies, so the FCC did allow different services to use "other" frequencies. To get that approved, an applicant would have to go through the frequency coordinators for their specific service as well as the service whose frequency they wanted to use.

That got to be kind of expensive for a public agency, so the FCC did as nd5y said, set everything up as a pool.