 The importance of fire line communications cannot be overstated. You simply cannot ignore the far too many fire line fatality investigation reports that point to poor communications as a causal factor to the accident. Over the years, the federal agencies have done their best to maintain and improve our current communication system. Keeping up with new technologies has always been a challenge. Cell phones, for example, have greatly improved communications on some levels, but we learned the hard way that vital operational information should only be transmitted over the radio so everyone can hear it. The latest technological challenge we're facing is the narrow banding of our radio frequencies. We're still in a transition period where some parts of the wildland fire community are using radios that do not have narrow band capabilities, or people with narrow band capabilities simply don't know how to use it. What this means for us is that when we find ourselves in a situation where mixed bandwidth radios are being used, this can lead to missed messages, volume control problems, and poor communications overall. To learn more about this problem and how to recognize when you have this problem and what to do with it, if you do encounter it, we turn to the radio and safety professionals from the National Interagency Fire Center. Let's hear what they had to say. Well, the whole narrow banding thing from what I've been told is that when Congress mandated that we divide our frequencies in half, all these frequencies that we use as federal agencies, they wanted more frequencies. There's so much going on in the world today that requires frequencies, maybe not in our VHF band, but it adds to the pool of things that require an extra frequency, all the cell phones, all the PDAs, all the blackberries that are out there. Everything that is wireless communication requires a frequency. So Congress wanted more and they're worth tons of money. Somebody told us the other day, Steve Jenkins from the RadioCache said, the latest figure was that a frequency was worth $23 billion. That's a lot of money. And so there's a lot of demand for those frequencies. So they cut them in half so they could have some more. And we didn't have a choice in this. They mandated, Congress mandated that we do it and that's how we got to the place where we are today. So we were ordered to narrow band January 1st, 2005, is when we had to do it. And it doubled the amount of frequencies. Does that mean that we in the fire world have twice the amount of frequencies? Not at all. They didn't give us any more. They just cut them in half and spread them out to other places. So I think it's all political demand. Who needs them worst and we didn't figure in there so well, I guess. Every year we do an end of year report where we break the safe nets down and just to see where they're coming from, what they're about. And so this is where we started noticing that we're getting a lot of issues about communications because 40% for the last five years of our safe nets have been communications issues. Either problems with radios, problems with repeaters, some of them refer to narrow banding by name although most of them are just generic radio problems. So that's how we started seeing that we had a problem with them. It's a combination of problems. If you're a wide band radio operating in a primarily or narrow band environment, all the frequencies that you should be on are narrow band requirement and therefore should be programmed narrow band and if you're not in a narrow band mode and transmit into them, sometimes you may be able to transmit and be received. Other times you may not be heard or the reception of your signal to a narrow band radio may be garbled or distorted to where you can't understand what they're saying. On the other hand, if you're a narrow band radio operating into a wide band environment, you're going to have fewer problems but you'll have problems by low audio. That'll be the most significant problem that you'll notice. People won't be able to hear you. Hey, you know, your batteries are well changed. You can't hear you very well. And because of that then some of your transmissions may be missed by the wide band radio and in some cases may not be received at all. Some of the federal agencies have not made the transition 100% at this point. They've gone back and they've asked for waivers. Some of the problems are money, buying equipment, getting the equipment installed, don't have the people to do it. It's a big, big change. It's a costly change to change all this equipment. And some of the agencies didn't start off in this process in 1995, so they haven't taken the 10 years to do it. They've just tried to do it in the last few years for whatever reason. And they're not quite there. So they're still operating in a wide band mode because of equipment issues, basically. The issue of cooperators that cooperate with federal government, state, local, fire departments, and so forth, they reside with their frequency assignments in the FCC side of the house. At this point they are not required to be a narrow band, so our radio equipment is narrow band compatible. Each channel can be programmed wide or narrow. As we cooperate with that rural fire department on their local channel in the 150 band, we program our radio wide band on that frequency, communicate without issue. If they are to cooperate with us on our frequencies in our band, their radios must be narrow band capable in order to match what we're required to transmit on and operate in. The issue of wide band and narrow band in the appropriate use is dependent upon the frequency that you're assigned and which side of the house you reside in, federal side or non-federal side. So the big key thing there is if you're on your home unit there, you make sure that there's a communication plan. Get with the local cooperators. Get with your cooperating agencies, other federal agencies that you share with. Get together, develop a communication plan when it's on this land and the head agency is a state or local county agency. You may be using their frequencies. If they don't have wide or narrow band capable radios, obviously you can program your radios to be on their frequencies in their wide band mode. You can communicate. It's sitting down and making these plans and doing this pre-work so that when you get in those situations for initial attack especially, because there's been a lot of problems in the initial attack world with this issue, you've already got a plan, everybody knows where they need to go. You're not trying to do something on the fly. That's when we run into problems. So pre-planning, getting your plans together, communication plans beforehand and making sure everybody understands what that plan is and how it worked and when to implement it. That would be the key thing. To give you an example of when we'd use wide band and when we'd use a narrow band channel or frequency in the same radio on the same incident, same fire, if you have an incident, well, let's say it's a state incident and your federal entities, it's cooperative response and you've got a plan there. Your channel one, channel two, channel three would be tack channels and you'll work with the federal folks and the state folks possibly and those are all federal frequencies that have been designated that they should be used in the narrow band mode. So those channels one, channel two, channel three would be a narrow band channel on those frequencies, on those federal frequencies. But in order for you, your command channel might be the state repeater that's up and that's how you're getting back to your dispatch. And at that, the state repeater is in the wide band mode and so on channel four, you would program channel four into the wide band mode with those frequencies. And so that there in your radio you'd have channel one, channel two, channel three in narrow band mode, channel four in the wide band mode. And so that would be an example of when you do them wide band and narrow band and it can be done very simply, just programming it correctly. If you recognize you have a narrow band problem, the ideal thing to do is check your radio, check your communications plan, identify if it should be a wide band or a narrow band channel and verify that it is, that you're either wide band or narrow band based on your command plan. If that's not the case, then when you get back you want to get it to radio folks or whoever needs to program that or repair that radio, whatever the situation, or replace that radio and get yourself a radio that'll accommodate wide band, narrow band so you could program it correctly. That's the ideal thing to do is to get it corrected and get it on the right band that you need to be. There are some things you can do based on whether you're wide band or narrow band, they're quick fixes, temporary fixes by no means are they what we'd suggest you spend the summer doing. If you get into a situation where you're wide band mode and you're talking through a repeater that's narrow band to get you back to camp or get you back to get your radio fixed you may want to turn your radio slightly so that you're not, if you're a loud voice person it'll help reduce how much audio how much voice, how high your voice level is into the microphone that can help you. It's not obviously a permanent fix but it can help you get to, until you get back in to get things repaired correctly. You can just watch yourself and try to reduce your volume a little bit. There are some things like that that you can do. Check if you're narrow band and you've got a wide band signal just be very conscientious of that. As you turn your volume down make sure you turn it back up. I think the big key thing here is as a radio user you are, you have a lot more responsibility on yourself now than you ever have before. You have to be the one to make sure you ask the questions. You know, is this a wide band or narrow band channel? You know, how am I supposed to use this frequency? Who am I communicating with? Is my radio tuned correctly? Has it been maintained correctly? There's a lot of these type of things that user radio user need to start asking because we're going through some changes, some big changes right now. And we found there's been a few more problems than what we had originally anticipated as a communication radio community. And there's a lot of different types of radios out there. They all operate in different ways. They're bad, they're good, they're just different and it's going to take a lot to get used to that. And we're going through the wide band, narrow band and we all have to be a lot more conscientious to what we're doing out there. It's not just pick up your radio after it's been in your pack all winter. Turn it on and it's going to work and you're going to talk. So there's some real responsibility upon the radio user at this point, I believe. There was an FFAS team that went out this last summer that identified a lot of issues. And with that an area command team came in to NIFC here and put together a good paper that identified some problems and issues and identified some resolution or some options to help alleviate some of these problems. So what we're doing at this point is the annual firefighter refresher. Getting the information out during this annual firefighter refresher is a key and that's one way to get people aware and the whole thing is to an awareness, I believe, to make people aware that there are issues and they can be resolved. And so firefighter refresher. The other thing is we have a website where we've identified radios, different types of radios out there. There's programming information on those radios. This is an evolving website. There will be more out there. That website address is there's no www, just radiosradios.nifc.gov. You can download information. There's tips. There's... You can post some notes and problems and get resolution from that so that's a good site to go to. The third thing we're doing is we're putting together a training program where we'll have people go out and meet with the firefighters out there and help identify some of these issues that have come up and try to raise the awareness level, help these folks out and answer their questions and provide some good training for them to help them through this next season to help eliminate some of the radio issues. For more information on radio communications and the conversion to narrowband frequencies, you can refer to the website listed in the reference section of your student workbook.