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Saturday, August 17, 2013

NFM in the UHF Miltiary Air Band?

Recently I have received reports of uses of narrow-band FM for voice traffic on various frequencies in the 225-380 MHz military air band. Most recently a report showed up on the MILCOM mailing list detailing how a Coast Guard C-130J was heard using NFM on 345.0 MHz to talk with a USCG cutter, then when calling their station inbound they were AM.

This may be due to the proliferation of all-mode radios in some military aircraft. Several years ago I caught some Air National Guard aircraft repeatedly trying to contact their base ops in NFM, but the base station was having a hard time hearing them because the base was AM.

Possibly these issues are due to incorrect settings on the radio presets, or operators not knowing what mode they should be in.

Anyone else catching aircraft using NFM in the UHF military band?


Friday, August 16, 2013

NTIA Plans Spectrum Monitoring

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) plans a remote, real-time, spectrum monitoring project. You can read some interesting, preliminary information about it here:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2013-20148.pdf

This project will monitor real world usage of radio frequency spectrum in 10 cities and evaluate possible plans to more efficiently utilize both federal and non-federal spectrum.