WA Radio Scanner Users' Group

yorky wrote:Then what's the advantage to these new frequencies?

For the most part, more channels. The VHF High band also makes it possible to use handhelds, which the huge antenna sizes with VHF mid (i.e. 78MHz) make impractical. Now that FESA/SES vehicles will have VHF mid band radios, they can also use them on close by bands such as VHF Marine.

The new radios also have UHF capability and can cross-band repeat between VHF and UHF. Why is that useful? For a start, UHF works well from within buildings, so personnel can use smaller UHF radios to talk to 6AR relayed through their vehicle automatically.

I've thought of another example (probably not a practical real-world example, but it shows my ignorance of these sorts of ops )Pretend for a moment there's a large search-and-rescue operation going on at the coast with many volunteers. We could have:

FRS etc vehicles using their VHF high band or UHF channels
SES using their UHF channels
Police using their UHF analogue channels
Private boats using VHF marine
Volunteers on foot with UHF CBs

Normally, the only way all of these people could communicate would be for a command post vehicle to be set up and have someone monitor all the radios on all the bands and relay messages between everyone - A huge hassle. Since vehicle with the new VHF/UHF radios can connect one channel on one band to another channel on another band, you can instead link together all these channels so everyone can hear all conversations regardless of what radio they're carrying.

Correction Gav. SES will be getting the VHF-High band/UHF radios.

New channel allocations are at this page.

Don't expect to hear much from them for a while - Esperance and the Great Southern are the only areas that I know of that have them operational.

Thanks to vk6hgr for hosting the file and pointing it out to me.

I heard a few radio checks between "aircraft 1" and Mundaring base and a few other stations on 164.350mhz today.

Always RX wrote:I heard a few radio checks between "aircraft 1" and Mundaring base and a few other stations on 164.350mhz today.

I heard them too, wondered what they were doing, it came over on nomal 78.100 freq jj

I've heard 163.250MHzand 164.3375MHz tonight.

So far the active VHF freqs/channels are:

164.0000MHz Canning Mills ch141
164.2750MHz Hacket's Gully ch207
164.3375MHz Jarradale ch220
163.2500MHz Red Hill ch306

yeah this new system is so good, i have my scanna on 'canning mills' now and with my crappy hand held scanna picks that up just as clear as my radio in my car

They sound really good too, much improved reception especially when I am mobile in the car. Incidentally the 164.3500MHz frequency I have been hearing from time to time appears to be licenced to CALM and is sited at Canning Mills.

Always RX wrote:They sound really good too, much improved reception especially when I am mobile in the car. Incidentally the 164.3500MHz frequency I have been hearing from time to time appears to be licenced to CALM and is sited at Canning Mills.

Likely the replacement for VHF-Mid Chan 23 (Water Bombers etc).

Fastlane wrote:

Always RX wrote:They sound really good too, much improved reception especially when I am mobile in the car. Incidentally the 164.3500MHz frequency I have been hearing from time to time appears to be licenced to CALM and is sited at Canning Mills.

Likely the replacement for VHF-Mid Chan 23 (Water Bombers etc).

Confirmed. DEC channel 644 (164.350MHz, 151.4Hz CTCSS) is linked to the water bomber channel 23 on the old system.

I have 163.2500MHz on the scanner in the car, and whilst it is great around the suburbs, I get terrible interference close to the City. It seems to cross a range of freq's as it comes up on 164.0000 as well.

Seems to be localised in the CBD as it starts near the Causeway and also Northbridge and Mitchell Freeway as you approach.

Can definitely hear talking on the channel that isn't FESA, though not enough to identify, but mostly just a high pitched squelch noise.

Anyone else noticed this?

If there is a high-power transmitter in the City it will stuff up Comcen when they start using high-band.

You will probably find you are suffering from Cross Modulation caused by the huge amount of RFI in the city. It takes a very good receiver not to suffer that and the pager interference.

which repeaters linked to 6ar and 6ip aswell as the old ch23 around the northern suburbs like Wanneroo, Joondalup, Warick, Clarkson, Yanchep and Nangara?

Ive tried 141, and 306..

cheers

Any VHF freqs used on firegrounds yet?

Yep - 268 & 365 at the Mount Barker fire Monday/Tuesday.