Hello. I am from Baltimore taking a bus trip to NYC tomorrow. As I setup my scanner, I am trying to find out if the VHF frequencies are still in use. I was told that they weren't, but they're still listed in the RRDB as active. Any help would be appreciated. TIA
FDNY VHF
- Thread starter Citywide74
- Start date
They are (usually) active (the Queens transmitter was in PA alarm the other day, not sure if it's back online), but coverage is not nearly as robust as it once was. You're better off sticking with the UHF frequencies inside city limits.
Plenty of agencies out there maintaining licenses for freqs not in use.
The VHF and 800mzh is the backup for the UHF repeaters as it gets crushed with tropo at times. They are all patched in together and live 24-7 believe they are all APX8500 mobiles and APX8000xe portable so all bands are in radios
You do not need to operate on a frequency to maintain an FCC license for part 90 use. Just simply renew when the time comes.
You're thinking of broadcast licenses, where you do need to operate within a 365 day window to keep it alive.
Well if that were true, they would've never taken them off the air to begin with, and yet they did, for years in fact. They also wouldn't have bothered installing all new repeaters and infrastructure for VHF if they were just there to keep something on the air, and yet they did.
There are thousands of licensed frequencies that haven't been used in ages all across the country. The FCC was never going to knock on the FDNY's door to tell them "use them or lose them!" 😂
If the FCC ever returns to being a technical (instead of legal and financial) organization, it should discover and take action on all of the frequency warehousing. In fact, it should be doing it already, instead of authorizing tons of new (profitable) devices on more and more new (profitable) spectrum.
The FCC did a license audit in 2001-2004 which they claimed was a success although my observation at the time was many licensees replied everything was operational, even systems never built or had been off the air for many years.
"The FCC mailed three audit letters to licensees, who were required to respond and indicate whether or not their stations included in the audit were 1) constructed and 2) operational in accordance with parameters of their most recent FCC authorization. The PLMRS audit is now completed and the final list of call signs that failed to provide a valid response is attached to Public Notice DA 04-1553 pdf) released on June 8, 2004. The audit was successful because it had a response rate of 98% and cancelled 37,448 licenses out of 420,112 licenses audited."
How often are these audits performed? Wonder if done now, how many would be cancelled.
The issue is that public safety licenses don't require any fees to renew, nor do they require any actual certification or re-coordination to show a station is still on the air, thus they get renewed in perpetuity even when frequencies have not been used for decades. I know of one county who renewed their 37 MHz frequencies for THIRTY YEARS after the last capable radio was gone. The FCC has no teeth or impetus to even care about most of this stuff.
The FDNY was in no danger whatsoever of losing any of their decades old VHF licenses. They re-built the VHF system to have more backup options, especially now that they have the multi-band APX 8x00 series subscribers that can take full advantage of VHF, UHF, 700/800 conventional and trunking. Anyone suggesting otherwise is misinformed.
The FDNY was in no danger whatsoever of losing any of their decades old VHF licenses. They re-built the VHF system to have more backup options, especially now that they have the multi-band APX 8x00 series subscribers that can take full advantage of VHF, UHF, 700/800 conventional and trunking. Anyone suggesting otherwise is misinformed.
They never repeated it after 2004. FCC seems to not care, like they never enforced deleting licenses that failed to narrow band after 2013. Frequency Coordinators wanted FCC action to resolve but it never happened.
