What do the colors mean? I know down here in Lee, we have some VHF channels that are also the same colors as those - do you think they might be DOF? I don't know the use of the channels.
Nothing. They were randomly selected before the NPSTC standard naming convention of interoperability channels. They just picked colors to disambiguate the different frequencies. Seems to be a patriotic-minded person who initially dreamed it up. That's fine.
VHF is not very common in
much of Florida, but, for the most part, agencies should transition to the APCO/NPSTC 1.104.2-2017 standard that the NIFOG follows for all mutual aid frequencies so the same kind of confusion that's in this thread doesn't propagate down to the field at an actual incident.
While the "Florida Forest Service" (there is no such thing as "Department of Forestry" anymore, it was renamed in 2011 under Agriculture and Consumer Services Commissioner Adam Putnam) uses these three frequencies (VFIRE21, VFIRE22, VFIRE23), they do not "own" the frequencies in any way, nor are they the exclusive end-user. When radios were programmed in narrowband mode, they should have been reprogrammed with the receivers in carrier squelch, but the transmit CTCSS in 156.7 Hz. Most of the equipment seems to have both the standard name and a reference to the old legacy name (either the full color name or R/W/B) to the right of the current channel mnemonic.
