Been busy with life stuff so sorry so late in reply.
Zerg, I'm nobody special but I do have a professional technical background in RF engineering (primarily TDMA cellular stuff, DSMR handsets, terrestrial+sat handsets, some digital cable TV stuff that didn't do good things to my career - nuff said, and some Bluetooth reference design for RF IC design folks) and have been a radio hobbyist for over 38 years and am VERY familiar with the technical (the internal radio design aspects as well as the operational aspects within various environments) aspects of LMR operation.
Enough of that junk...
Rereading my last I think I came off in a pretentious fashion for which I sincerely apologize! Nevertheless, I stand by my basic assessment - the solution presented for the jumpers and rapellers is certainly not ideal but is acceptable given the usual operating environments and procedures as outlined by ExSmokey and others and given the limitations of available channels in the newest Federal pool PLUS the more nebulous aspects of typical Federal bureaucratic operational procedures. I leave it to ExSmokey and others like him to inform us about the wildland management and fire fighting procedures and "dumb them down" for those of us not involved in those professions just as I try to do from a RF technical angle.
I cannot say that the use of one frequency to handle both rapellers and smoke jumpers using different CTCSS tones will NEVER result in problems at some point in the future nor can I say that no injuries or deaths will result directly or indirectly from that solution. I don't really think anyone can - we CAN present possible scenarios or models that COULD result in such problems but then we have to look at the real likelihood of those situations actually happening and weigh that against the other limitations that the planners had to contend with which included but were not likely limited to what frequencies were available and what governmental bureaucratic obstacles were in their way given the time limit they were operating within.
No matter how much thought, sweat, blood, and tears you throw at a solution, in a human environment within current corporate or government institutional constraints you will HAVE to make compromises and you will almost certainly NOT be happy 100% of the time with all of those compromises. I know this from my RF engineering lab experience and I am pretty certain that ExSmokey knows this from his experiences in wildland management. So many times in my experience engineering staff knew what the best solution to a problem was but were not allowed to implement that solution due to cost constraints or to other design constraints they had no control over. A compromise was the only game in town - that's pretty much the name of the game in practical engineering and I rather think also in all of life.
I wish ideal solutions could always be implemented to all problems but it simply can't be; sometimes the constraints put upon planners of any profession and at all levels will seem ridiculous when viewed from only one or only a limited number of angles (e.g. in this case from only very narrow technical and operational points of view one may not understand why only one radio frequency is made available to two usage groups) but will make more sense when the view is widened to include the less elegant aspects of the entire planning environment (available resources, conflicting needs from rival departments, the relatively slow speed of governmental procedure modification and implementation, etc.).
As ExSmokey said, in the documents outlined the powers that be have stated they will modify the solution to give exclusive frequencies to the two groups if recurrent situations of harmful interference are noted. I know you can fire back that someone could be injured or die in the meantime but choices were made within limited resource environments and given constraints we can only guess at - again, the ideal may be a laudable goal but is seldom if ever reached.
-Mike
Zerg, I'm nobody special but I do have a professional technical background in RF engineering (primarily TDMA cellular stuff, DSMR handsets, terrestrial+sat handsets, some digital cable TV stuff that didn't do good things to my career - nuff said, and some Bluetooth reference design for RF IC design folks) and have been a radio hobbyist for over 38 years and am VERY familiar with the technical (the internal radio design aspects as well as the operational aspects within various environments) aspects of LMR operation.
Enough of that junk...
Rereading my last I think I came off in a pretentious fashion for which I sincerely apologize! Nevertheless, I stand by my basic assessment - the solution presented for the jumpers and rapellers is certainly not ideal but is acceptable given the usual operating environments and procedures as outlined by ExSmokey and others and given the limitations of available channels in the newest Federal pool PLUS the more nebulous aspects of typical Federal bureaucratic operational procedures. I leave it to ExSmokey and others like him to inform us about the wildland management and fire fighting procedures and "dumb them down" for those of us not involved in those professions just as I try to do from a RF technical angle.
I cannot say that the use of one frequency to handle both rapellers and smoke jumpers using different CTCSS tones will NEVER result in problems at some point in the future nor can I say that no injuries or deaths will result directly or indirectly from that solution. I don't really think anyone can - we CAN present possible scenarios or models that COULD result in such problems but then we have to look at the real likelihood of those situations actually happening and weigh that against the other limitations that the planners had to contend with which included but were not likely limited to what frequencies were available and what governmental bureaucratic obstacles were in their way given the time limit they were operating within.
No matter how much thought, sweat, blood, and tears you throw at a solution, in a human environment within current corporate or government institutional constraints you will HAVE to make compromises and you will almost certainly NOT be happy 100% of the time with all of those compromises. I know this from my RF engineering lab experience and I am pretty certain that ExSmokey knows this from his experiences in wildland management. So many times in my experience engineering staff knew what the best solution to a problem was but were not allowed to implement that solution due to cost constraints or to other design constraints they had no control over. A compromise was the only game in town - that's pretty much the name of the game in practical engineering and I rather think also in all of life.
I wish ideal solutions could always be implemented to all problems but it simply can't be; sometimes the constraints put upon planners of any profession and at all levels will seem ridiculous when viewed from only one or only a limited number of angles (e.g. in this case from only very narrow technical and operational points of view one may not understand why only one radio frequency is made available to two usage groups) but will make more sense when the view is widened to include the less elegant aspects of the entire planning environment (available resources, conflicting needs from rival departments, the relatively slow speed of governmental procedure modification and implementation, etc.).
As ExSmokey said, in the documents outlined the powers that be have stated they will modify the solution to give exclusive frequencies to the two groups if recurrent situations of harmful interference are noted. I know you can fire back that someone could be injured or die in the meantime but choices were made within limited resource environments and given constraints we can only guess at - again, the ideal may be a laudable goal but is seldom if ever reached.
-Mike