Many states have just 1 statewide fire mutual aid channel + 1 statewide police mutual aid channel + 1 statewide EMS mutual aid channel. Usually in the VHF high band. Sometimes at UHF. Some states have 4 or 5 channels at 800 Mhz for unit to unit comms. Beyond that - there aint much available. Massachusetts does not have any statewide mutual aid channels. Connecticut has just 1 (for police). Several of the statewide mutual aid channels have no PL - some are for mobile use only.
There are some nationwide channels that are available. Roughly - 50 at 700 Mhz - 5 at 800 Mhz - 4 at 453 Mhz - 5 at VHF high band (direct) - plus approx 20 federal interops channels at VHF high (mixture of direct and repeater) - and maybe 1 or 2 direct freqs at low band (45.88 and 39.42 etc). The nationwide ITacs UTac and Vtacs are set up to provide 1 calling channel and multi tac channels. The basic idea is that the calling channel is used to obtain a tac channel. But tac channels are usually pre-assigned by county. So I am not really sure what the calling channels are supposed to be used for. In any case - this just leaves 1 tac channel to be shared by all agencies in each county. There is just 1 PL used nationwide - if any PL is used at all. Bottom line - mutual aid radio channels are few and far between. They are rarely used, rarely tested, sparsley implemented, have little coverage, and many still have primary users that refuse to vacate the channels and relinquish them for mutual aid operations. Good Morning USA!!!! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "massfire" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/massfire. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
