171.1375 has been used on the large fires on the Los Padres. Some of our members in the Salinas Valley and Monterey have reported its use. It was also used on some of the large fires in southern California last year. I understand that it does not show up on FIRESCOPE and state frequency lists. I'm looking at the official frequency list for a NIRSC repeater that was taken out of the large fiberglass case it is contained in. The Comm Unit leader for the Sherwin Fire took it out of the case and handed it to me.
The ad hoc frequencies are those that are not on the list I obtained. There are four zones in California for the purpose of assigning frequencies that are not on the list I have. A computer is used to determine if the use of a particular frequency will cause interference on a frequency allocated to a federal agency. If it isn't then it is used for an incident. The Comm Unit Leader told me that each zone has command, tactical, and air tactics frequencies assigned up to about 30 annually. This list changes each year as some of those frequencies are allocated to other agencies, but are not being used in the current year, but might be allocated for use to an agency the next year. Looking at the long lists that people have provided for the large southern California fires last year and the fires on the Los Padres National Forest this year finds a lot of FM air/air tactics - air/ground frequencies that we haven't seen listed before. Some from last year haven't shown up this year. The pool of federal frequencies for each of the four zones in California is huge, so huge that without the computer, according to the Comm Unit leader I spoke with, the job would be overwhelmingly complicated.
I should note that the 166.6875 has been permanently assigned for the Sierra Front zone of Nevada (Minden dispatch for the Toiyabe National Forest, Carson City District of the BLM , and NDF Western Region) as the secondary air to ground frequency.
Another set of frequencies that haven't shown up in the FIRESCOPE plan is the new crew nets or "Intra-Crew Communications Plan" frequencies. I've posted these four frequencies before and added them to the Wiki site under the National Incident Radio Support Cache listing. The frequencies are:
163.7125* National Crew (for use mobilizing and traveling to incidents)
167.1375 Primary Crew (for use on incidents)
168.6125* Secondary Crew (for use on incidents)
173.6250 Tertiary Crew (for use on incidents)
The frequencies with an * are the new federal common simplex frequencies that are replacing 163.100 and 168.350, which are now assigned for temporary/itinerant repeater use. The list I obtained from the cache repeater still shows 163.100 and 168.350 as simplex commons. It will probably be a couple of years before all the agencies catch up and make the change. I have already heard 168.6125 being used as a tactical in a couple of National Parks in California and must be a replacement for 168.350, which had been the standard tactical used in National Parks for many years.
Lots of changes are occurring, especially in the UHF band where the NTIA Redbook contained a lot of new direction for use of frequencies in that band. I don't think we will see any of the zone federal pool frequencies listed in the FIRESCOPE comm plan as they change each year. From now on it will be important to have a scanner on search once a fire gets large enough that initial attack frequencies and the Type 3-5 organization hands the incident over to a Type 1 or 2 incident management team. That is when the use of the zone pool will occur.
Don't forget to have the federal interoperability frequencies in a scanner when you are within reception range of a large incident. We have seen some of those frequencies used for both command and tactical. I'm glad that the capacity of the PSR-600's I just bought this winter allow for all these new frequencies. My "old" PRO-96 doesn't have enough capacity to do the job correctly.
