Government Master File

For those who may have missed the discussions on Radio Reference or in the pages of The Spectrum Monitor magazine, there has been a redacted version of the Government Master File of federal radio frequencies made available on line. 

 

The web site Government Attic obtained the unclassified portion of the GMF and posted it on their site. The first page of the PDF file indicate that Government Attic requested the GMF copy from the Department of Commerce through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The request was submitted on May 19 and was released on June 25, 2021. 

 

 Here is a link to the file if you wish to download it for yourself:

https://www.governmentattic.org/41docs/NTIAgovtMasterFile_2021.pdf

 

The released PDF file is 82 megabytes large and contains over 15,500 pages of text information from the GMF, although some have noticed that there are some blank and duplicate pages in this file. It is important to note that this is only a portion of the entire Government Master File, a portion that had been unclassified for release. 

 

Those who are in the know say that this release is only about 20 percent of the entire file. The entire GMF is quite large and is only available to persons or organizations who hold a government security clearance. Sensitive frequencies used by agencies of the Justice Department, Homeland Security, Department of State, etc., are all redacted from this document.

 

Despite being heavily edited, there are some interesting federal frequencies listed for various offices and agencies that you may not have known about before, so definitely check it out if you have time to look through the file. 

Since this version of the GMF extract is a PDF file, your PDF reader program should have a search function built in. I have found that to find a specific frequency, you can search for “M162.5500”, with M standing for Megahertz and K for kilohertz. You can search for city names or federal facility names or locations.