Happy Narrow Band Eve!

Just a few hours 'till we fall off the fiscal cliff and hit the narrow band deadline. Monrovia PD finally switched over last Friday, and now I am waiting for the mutual aid fiasco to begin.

The states "White" frequencies switched over to the nationally standardized V-Fire nomenclature a few years ago. White 2 became VFire 22, White 3 became VFire 23, and starting January 1st, the last holdout, White 1 will narrow band and become VFire 21. I have a feeling LA County fire will still refer to their VHF radios as their "White" radio even there will no longer be any "White" channels.

I have heard many local police agencies still use the "CLEMARS" nomenclature when post narrowbanding the label should now be CA LAW1. So I wonder, have they not narrowbanded their CLEMARS freqs, or did they keep the old CLEMARS label on their narrow band channels? Either way I'm guessing there is going to be some confusion and over deviation in 2013.

Have a great one and don't forget your spare battery!

LA County Fire, actually starts narrow-banding.

Well it was no April fools joke, I woke up this morning and noticed something was different, there was no 0700 "wake up call" on LA County Tac 19. That's because Tac 19 is no more.

For years there has been a daily 7:00 AM test of the old Quick Call alerting system on what was a remnant of the original VHF dispatch system for LA County Fire. In recent years the 154.400 MHz frequency, called Tac 19, has been used for communicating between LA County dispatch and various County Fire and LASD Air Rescue helicopters, not to mention by USFS, Cal Fire, and Search and Rescue personell on the ground during emergencies.

What old Moto radios are NB capable?

I was in a discussion the other day of what Jedi series radios could be narrowbanded to 12.5kHz. This pdf file from Motorola lists that the following discontinued portables "may be capable of migrating to 12.5 kHz Efficiency."

AXU4100
AXV5100
CP100
CP125
CP150
HT1000
HT1550 XLS
JT 1000
MT 2000
MTS 2000
ASTRO Saber
Spirit GT
SPIRIT M
XPR6300
XPR6500
XTN
XTS 3000
XTS 3500

Not sure what they mean by "May Be," probably just means depending on when the radio was made, or how it is flashed you are SOL. Why don't they just publish a "these will be paperweights after Jan 1st, 2013" list, or a FUBAR list?