Tuesday, December 31, 2019

The Passing of Uniden's Paul Opitz

Word began spreading last night about the death of Paul Opitz, otherwise known as "UPMan" on the scanner forums on Radio Reference.

Paul was the product manager for radio scanners at the Uniden Corporation in the U.S. He was instrumental in the design and development of all the recent models of radio scanners made and sold by Uniden.

https://forums.radioreference.com/threads/sad-news-about-paul-opitz-upman.399210/

Paul discovered he had cancer very suddenly in 2017 and decided to blog about it. It shows how determined he was to fight and provided some interesting insight to the man that many radio hobbyists knew, but had never met;

http://massivelyuninformed.me/category/throat-blog/?order=asc

Memorial information for Mr. Rodney Paul Opitz, R.I.P. -

https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/fort-worth-tx/rodney-opitz-8977535

Monday, December 30, 2019

January 2020 TSM Corrections

Well, I somehow managed to fat-finger some frequencies in the January 2020 edition of Federal Wavelengths and wanted to post some corrections.

In my January column I spoke about where to look for federal radio traffic. Here are the ranges as I intended to list them:

Most of the active federal radio systems near you are going to be in two distinct bands of radio frequencies. The federal VHF Hi-band runs from 162.0 MHz to 174.0 MHz, with the channels being assigned in 12.5 kHz steps. The federal UHF band runs from 406.0 MHz to 420.0 MHz, also in 12.5 kHz steps. There are some additional ranges of frequencies that are sometimes used by federal and military operations that might be active in your area. The VHF lo-band from 30 MHz to 50 MHz is often used by military aircraft and ground units in the FM analog mode. The ranges of 138.0 MHz through 144.0 MHz and 148.0 MHz through 150.875 MHz are often used by military land mobile and aircraft operations. They can be AM (for aircraft) or FM (for land mobile) mode and may be digital as well. There is a small piece of radio spectrum above the federal UHF band that runs from 400.0 MHz to 406.0 MHz, that is normally assigned to radio astronomy use, but there are exceptions for military and federal use. There have been several examples of federal operations being heard in this range of frequencies, but it’s rare."