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Been hearing bits and pieces of radio traffic on the West system. Just heard a mobile unit "6603" running 28/29's with "San Bernardino" and advising he was going to be in the Oak Mountain area.. It's on a TG labeled FICC (Federal Interagency Communications Center) so I'm thinking a BLM ranger. Unit just made a traffic stop on Varner Rd X Mountain View. Running more 28/29's. It is 1230 Sunday 01/19/2014.

sp1989 wrote:Been hearing bits and pieces of radio traffic on the West system. Just heard a mobile unit "6603" running 28/29's with "San Bernardino" and advising he was going to be in the Oak Mountain area.. It's on a TG labeled FICC (Federal Interagency Communications Center) so I'm thinking a BLM ranger. Unit just made a traffic stop on Varner Rd X Mountain View. Running more 28/29's. It is 1230 Sunday 01/19/2014.

That's very interesting

Haven't hear anything else since then, though. Slow day I'm guessing....Hearing more 28/29's from same unit at 1549 hrs. I thought maybe EDACS was repeating some other freq so I plugged in all the BLM LE freqs I could find, and nothing heard on them, but the EDACS TG is loud & clear.

The BLM has long been a subscriber to the EDACS system. It covers some areas better than their VHF system does. So much for the notion that EDACS coverage was all that bad. BLM uses it more in the manner that it was designed for - mobile radios, not portables.

What I would be curious about is what the migration plan is to get agencies like BLM and the railroad police off of EDACS and onto PSEC. All those odd users were discussed in the needs assessments.

zz0468 wrote:The BLM has long been a subscriber to the EDACS system. It covers some areas better than their VHF system does. So much for the notion that EDACS coverage was all that bad. BLM uses it more in the manner that it was designed for - mobile radios, not portables.

What I would be curious about is what the migration plan is to get agencies like BLM and the railroad police off of EDACS and onto PSEC. All those odd users were discussed in the needs assessments.

With RSO on board, the system had been overloaded. Let's hope they can make really good use of the PSEC.

In all the years I have been scanning RSO both wth a scanner and and EDACS radio (at work) I've never heard any traffic on the FICC TG. Maybe it's just because other TGs were so busy. I spent the last 2 days in Central system coverage area, and heard nothing from FICC. I'm sure it's rangers, as I heard one closing out a contact with a citation of hikers at some trail head somewhere. Sorry, not a nature boy so it didn't ring any bells.

cvrules90 wrote:With RSO on board, the system had been overloaded. Let's hope they can make really good use of the PSEC.

It was RSO's mismanagement of the EDACS system that caused it to be overloaded. Let's hope they don't make the same mistakes.

But we won't know everything if it's all encrypted. If they do, they'll likely dump it and fall back to EDACS until they can find a good solution.