equipment advice

News, meet-ups, general questions, emergency services procedures etc

Moderators: vk6hgr, Zebedee

Post Reply
reefraider
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Feb 01, 2016 10:30 am
Scanners and Receivers: 0

equipment advice

Post by reefraider »

Hi,

We have just spent the last 5 days fighting fires all around our property it did come in also, was hell on wheels, we may well never see it happen again but what came out of it was our lack of communications, as the phones were no good and the one radio we had in the car was just not cutting it with a handheld unless you were parked next to each other, emergencies services were having intermittent problems too and the defes comms centre van had to move up onto a hill to get any traction, we do have a giant police com tower on the property but that didn't help anyone much did it! So my question is we would like to monitor emergency services, have a radio basestation at house and a fixed radio in a vehicle and good quality handhelds in other vehicles any suggestions pls
vk6hgr
Site Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 2610
Joined: Thu Feb 24, 2005 10:33 pm
Amateur callsign: VK6HGR
Scanners and Receivers: Various Yaesu, Kenwood, Tait, Simoco and Philips'
Location: Perth, Western Australia
Contact:

Re: equipment advice

Post by vk6hgr »

Hi Reefraider

Two questions: Where are you located and what is the size of the property? For the radios, how many vehicles and what sort of budget do you have?

As for monitoring, the frequencies DFES use are on this website (other emergency services are encrypted digital) and can be received with an ordinary radio scanner.
Gavin Rogers; VK6HGR
http://vk6hgr.ampr.org/
WARSUG forum administrator
Site and stream donations: https://www.paypal.me/vk6hgr
reefraider
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Feb 01, 2016 10:30 am
Scanners and Receivers: 0

Re: equipment advice

Post by reefraider »

5000 ac north Lancelin only 2 handheld 1 base station 1 vehicle budget? could never happen again and only 2 of us live here but really it has to be done we have 1 uhf sitting in the car and a hand held but they didn't seem to work we really needed to be able to here what was going on, a dpaw guy gave me a couple of channels to contact them on but didn't work are they scrambled?
yorky
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 2630
Joined: Tue Sep 13, 2005 7:46 pm
Location: Perth

Re: equipment advice

Post by yorky »

5000 acre's is a massive amount of land to cover with ground to ground radios (without a repeater up high).

Do you have many hills or trees on the land? If there are hills, UHF will pretty much die without good line of sight. Also depends what the earth is consisting off (some ground absorbs radio signals rather than bouncing it).

Ideally, you would need a mast and radio setup. Problem then is you can't legally stick a repeater on it without buying a license + getting the appropriate gear. Rather expensive for what you want.

What did DPaW give you for a channel? I'm guessing a UHF CB channel, as certain radios in fire trucks with both DPaW and DFES can receive UHF CB however without a repeater the distance would be minimal due to the 5W power output limit, even on a vehicle.

And don't think it won't happen again, another x years of fuel load may give you time to prepare only.
"VKI, NJ050 will you be attending the job?"
"Negative VKI, my desk is bolted to the floor".
WARSUG General Scanning Moderator
Post Reply