I completely agree, no offence taken. After 4yrs in the FD and 8yrs in the US army infantry i'm well aware of the caliber of people that are required to run and use the radio, and your right it has to be simplified for us. I didnt start actually understanding radio until I was in the army a couple years. And it wasn't exactly the smartest move I made. Talk about adding a serious work load. Being able to work with "Comsec" "time""frequency hop" and swapping frequencies is baffling to most people. Hell it was to me too when I was in the FD, and there are much more knowledgeable people out there as far as civilian radio goes(ramcharger) because I honestly didn't have a grasp of how it worked than. And maybe I shouldn't have jumped into this thread because of it and I apologize if i just mucked things up. Just trying to help with what I knew than.
Heres what I "know" we had 3 different channels(how they worked the frequencies I dont know I wasnt an engineer I was a nozzleman) I just know that when we got a fire we had to drop down off of the dispatch channel because when you have several fires coordinating people on the ground at the same time dispatch couldn't dispatch anything(the BC ran 2 radios in his truck). I was told PD had more because they generally had more to coordinate. Was just trying to mention to the original poster the possibility that he may have been on a PD frequency but not a dispatch one. Since I have been in WA(Tacoma area) there as been a lot of controversy in the PD over what is said over the radio by officers( think Lakewood and the show "cops") and not all conversations had between officers over airwaves are public domain anymore. How they do it i'm not sure, maybe someone else can chime in but im fairly certain that COMSEC for law enforcement id federally prohibited.
