[FedCom] FEMA

[Chris Parris]

> FEMA has been history in the 138-144 MHz band for sometime now. I can
verify
> that they were no longer authorized in this band as far back as 1993 and
> wrote about that in MT. Of course, some book publications and magazine
> columnist are incapable of throwing away a freq, even when the evidence
says
> otherwise.

Larry is correct in that FEMA has had no dedicated allocations in the 138 to
144 band for a while, but they still continue to use frequencies in that
band. Bob pointed out that he still hears these frequencies in the Kansas
City area, Blaine is hearing them out of Denton, TX and I've gotten many
recent reports of the Bothell, WA FEMA office still using 139.950 MHz.

As to what they are going to do with these, not sure but I do know that FEMA
has been buying UHF P-25 radios in large numbers. I haven't seen any
indication of large purchases of P-25 VHF radios by FEMA.. However, I
suspect that the FEMA MERS vehicles will always have VHF available for
interoperability.

I covered the FEMA UHF radio channels in the July Monitoring Times Fed Files
column, and also listed the new VHF allocations that Ken mentioned. These
"new" VHF 12.5  KHz channels are not allocated to FEMA per se, but will be
available for "Emergency Management" use by the DoD and FEMA as well.

- Chris

 --
Chris Parris
Fed Files Columnist
Monitoring Times Magazine
chrisparris at monitoringtimes.com
http://www.monitoringtimes.com
http://mt-fedfiles.blogspot.com/