This is for Canada which has some differences from U.S. in band usage and step size in VHF band.You can download a user manual for a Uniden scanner. They show a bandplan that should match if Uniden have looked at what FCC have assigned to different users. This is from the Uniden SDS200 manual and what is used when the scanner are set to use auto settings.
/Ubbe
Thanks Dave. I appreciate the information. I did notice that when scanning the 165 freq range I did catch an US frequency of 165.235 which was 165.2375. It's hard to scan so close to the US border but like you said using 5khz will allow me to catch the offset ones after some corrections.To my knowledge Canada does not use 12.5kHz channel spacing anywhere in the 138-144 and 148-174MHz
bands, except 25kHz in the marine band 156/157MHz and 161MHz (exact boundaries can be checked).
The U.S. uses 12.5kHz in 138-144MHz, 148-150.775 and 162-174MHz plus marine band. The rail sub-band of course uses 15kHz/7.5kHz across NA including Canada.
The 2m ham band is 144-148MHz and I would use 5kHz step.
Some places in U.S. such as Alaska appear to use 12.5kHz in the 15x.xxx sub-band.
Canada uses 15kHz/7.5kHz in all sub-bands except marine, with odd exceptions; a few cases of "off-grid"
assignments here and there.The grid "alignment" changes in several places in the 148-174MHz band.
VHF searching with 5kHz steps is not bad but could miss some 7.5kHz assignments; therefore 2.5kHz would
be better (assuing the scanner supports it, most newer ones do), but is going to slow down searching. I generally stick to 5kHz, as something off by 2.5kHz can generally be heard but somewhat distorted. Setting to 7.5kHz
could end up with an alignment issue when crossing these "boundaries".
In the UHF bands, use 12.5kHz or 6.25kHz steps for Canada and U.S.
Dave
118-137 MHz AM aircraft is mostly 25 kHz channel steps in North America. There is some non-ATC use of 8.33 kHz steps in the US. For more on that see my posts in this thread: 8.33 spacing questionsWhat is the proper scan step for VHF air and UHF air in Canada/North America? I use 5khz for vhf but understand some areas use a different step size.
It's true that most frequencies have been changed to 8.33Khz steps but at my location 95% are still at the old 25KHz frequency and can be scanned with that step size. 3 x 8.33=25KHz. In my area it's more or less 2 high altitude frequencies used at 30.000-40.000ft that could interfere with other countries that use a frequency that doesn't match the old step size.I don't know if Canada uses 8.33 steps at all. Europe is almost all 8.33 kHz steps now.
