WA Radio Scanner Users' Group

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

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.

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?

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.