I’m in Union County. I have only been monitoring for a few months now, but I have never heard anything out of Forestry in AWIN. I have heard Forestry use VHF for fire grounds operations on a few different occasions over the past few months, but I didn’t pay attention to which frequency. I’m not sure if that’s their procedure statewide, or if each district does different. One fire they had at least two air tankers and a survey plane assisting them. I didn’t hear a lot of traffic from the tankers, so they might have been operating primarily on another frequency. I gathered that they were using El Dorado airport for fuel, but I think they were using another airport for water. There was a lot of traffic back and forth between the ground operations and the survey plane though, and it sounded as if the survey pilot may have been relaying instructions from the ground to the tanker pilots on another frequency.
As for AGFC, I hear a lot of traffic from them on AWIN, although it sounds like they conduct most of their business via telephone or email. Most of what I hear is “10-8”, “10-7”, “10-6 out of the vehicle on foot”, and “I’ll be out in reference to that email/phone call that I received”. Occasionally I’ll hear them doing license checks, DL/warrant checks, and vehicle registration checks. I have heard them mention switching to another frequency for unit-to-unit communications, but I have never received any traffic on any of the VHF frequencies.
I should add that I could be missing a lot of traffic, as I’m still working on my antenna situation at my house. Apparently my house is in a hole with a lot of pine trees between me and the transmitters/repeaters. I’m to the point now where I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to put up a base antenna if I want to receive both VHF high and P25 700/800.
