Thursday, June 16, 2011 — Nothing says “Holy shit, that hurts!” like blobs of molten solder on bare skin. And brother, I was doing that song and dance over the weekend in my shack.
Having built a new from-stratch copper j-pole a couple of weeks ago for use at a mobile command post for a non-profit group’s cycling event, I decided it was time to bring in my old copper pipe j-pole from outside.
This j-pole was probably built when we lived in Elizabethtown a decade and a half ago. I have used it ever since we moved here as a monitoring antenna, and for the secondary antenna (that’s hamspeak for “I’m too lazy to mount the thing properly” antenna). This poor j-pole has been stuck in the ground outside the shack window (the mud pushed up the copper pipe gives it superior grounding, of course!). When its fallen over, I’ve pushed it back in the dirt or simply leaned it up against the house (brick is an insulator, right??).
I keep a transceiver hooked to the antenna so I can monitor multiple frequencies. Being the nosy busy-body I am, I like to have the scanner running, and then have at least two mobile ham rigs monitoring either ham or additional public service frequencies.
It’s invaluable in newsgathering for my website, too. I have two scanners and two VHF/UHF rigs at my disposal. One scanner stays on EMS; the other scans public service; one of the ham rigs monitors a ham repeater or public service (depending on what’s going on) and the second ham rig monitors the local repeater or … yep, a fourth public service frequency.
How’s all this work? Very well, though my ability to filter multiple conversations gets taxed at times.
In the event of a serious highway crash, I can monitor EMS, the fire department, the incoming medical helicopter and scan the other public service frequencies. Of course, all of this wonderful capability is likely to come to a halt come Jan. 1, 2013 when the FCC’s narrowbanding mandate hits.
The majority of public safety agencies are switching to one proprietary digital voice mode or another. A few (including some here in our county) are going to go narrowband analog, which is the least expensive way to meet the FCC mandate.
Every commercial radio sold in the past 5-7 years will operate narrowband analog right out of the box, so all recent vintage mobile radios and handhelds will transition just fine without the need to replace them. The biggest cost will be replacing repeaters, and in some areas, require additional satellite receivers to cover new dead spots the narrowbanding will create.
But sales people want to sell, and the vendors are pushing hard the new digital voice systems, which allow public service comms to be more private (until the scanner radio market catches up with scanners that will access the different digital audio techniques). They’ll be expensive, but they’ll be available.
There will also be a flood of surplus commercial VHF gear on the market, particularly repeaters — which might be a big help to the amateur repeater owner looking to replace an aging system.
The FCC mandate is certain, and won’t be extended. All commercial radio users in the high VHF bands will also be moving to new frequencies. The whole reason for narrowbanding is to reduce interference, and all entities will be given new frequencies in order to better separate them from neighboring users. For example, the EMS dispatchers use a common frequency between our county and a neighboring one — not ideal to avoid interference. That sort of thing will change.
Another change will be that high-band VHF commercial users will no longer be allowed to do paging on their voice frequencies. There are two paging-only frequencies that public service agencies will be able to use. No more toning out the fire department or EMS on their voice frequency.
We’ll see these new radio systems continue to go online, and the pace will accelerate as we near the end of this year and on into next year.
One of our elderly hams in the county tells me often that the narrowbanding mandate applies to amateur radio. Despite my best efforts to convince him otherwise, he’s convinced that we have to go narrowband at the same time. There’s damn little congesting on the Amateur VHF bands; in fact, there’s way more repeaters that seldom see much use than the opposite. During my visit earlier this year to Chicago, I found the majority of their area repeaters fairly devoid of activity. If the FCC imposes narrowbanding on ham radio, it won’t be for the same reason as they have with public service radios.
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