Newark always had a strong signal I used to listen to them in Hawthorne N.Y. in the 70's. Whats interesting is that there didn't seem to be any real co-ordination to prevent overlapping coverage and not going with the 37dbu contour for isolation. In the RR world most licenses are a minimum of 50 mi apart.
The only reason Bergen ended up on .55 was because of a snafoo by Westchester letting their license lapse. Westchester also had to spend about 1 mil to put in a simulcast system with lots of directional antennas to protect Bergen and some small department in south Jersey on .310.
So see what happens when you don't pay attention to your license renewal letters. Also Hackensack PD used the same input 159.03 as Westchester on .55. Not sure who made that one up, and Hackensac only had portables in Converta-comms.
I know I can go engineer with you. On UHF it's actually a 39 dBuV/m F(50,50) for incumbents vs. 21 dBuV/m F(50,10) of the proposed, but yeah, VHF is 37/19. And, for VHF, you have to protect the 7.5 kHz adjacents. You're
NEVER going to get that in the NY Metro. Probably not in the last 55 years! I hate to take sides in the digital divergence, but NXDN stands the best chance of getting licensed in the region because you can proceed with minimal concern for adjacent channels.
The only way VHF and now UHF had a chance to be spread across the region without interfering is if they used Region 8-like measures to contain signal. 80% of your signal needs to be contained within the jurisdictional boundary plus a 5 mile buffer. No more listening to fire pages on the way down to Wildwood, unless it's through a streaming app. But the problem is that first-come-first-serve implementations are way, way over height, and way, way over power for what they're really needed. The net result is something I mentioned either earlier here or in another NJ thread - you have a 1.5 square mile borough with 6 voting receivers to hear portables, not because they're weak, but because they're getting clobbered by strong signals. I put my old department up on T-Band when the waiver to extend Channel 19 northward was granted because we couldn't hear portables a half mile away because of a repeater output 55 miles away in Pike County, PA. PD was worse with some of the Nassau muni's getting repeaterized on the same frequency they were using in simplex (and now where are they going to go if politics wins out and they have to give the spectrum back?).
Pile s'more on the heap, just have them sign those concurrences and that's all there is.
I still say we refarm low band. But we'd have to get rid of all the hard-patch pollution, first.
