28 February 2023

What are often called "town channels" are conventional radio systems, usually analog and usually rural, that are used as a common or catch-all channel for a municipality's LMR communications. Many times the town public works/highway department frequency will serve as the town channel. They may or may not have a different PL/DPL/NAC for town channel communications. Most of the time they are licensed, but sometimes they run under an expired license, a license listed as something other than the municipal entity, or with no license at all. Those factors make finding and identifying them a challenge. Once you have accomplished this task, you generally find that they are a good source of information as to what's going on in town, especially during disasters or bad weather.

Town channels are useful and important because they allow all the departments in a municipality to have a common channel for interoperability during disasters. They also allow a town that otherwise may be dispatched by a county or state on the county/state system to have an off-system place to talk privately. From a monitoring standpoint town channels are usually non-encrypted, and non-trunked so you don't need a $600+ scanner to monitor them.

I've noticed that scanner hobbyist websites often have incomplete or incorrect information about town channels. The sites will either not have a frequency listed, or have an incorrect PL/DPL/NAC listed for the frequency. The best way to start looking for a town channel is to visit the FCC General Menu Reports website and do a query for every frequency licensed by the town and local businesses on the same band (VHF-low, VHF-high, or UHF) that might have a relationship with the town (i.e. the owner being a chief at the local volunteer department). Those are the frequencies you will start monitoring for activity.

When doing your research pay particular attention to frequencies that are licensed to more than one town in an area. Many rural towns have some form of mutual aid arrangement, and any communications in that regard are usually done on a shared frequency, and become a multi-town channel. You also want to include expired licenses for the municipality in your search. Occasionally a smaller rural municipality will be running under an expired license because the original person responsible for handling FCC licensing has left the town's employ, and the remaining employees are unaware of the renewal requirement or process. In many cases the town frequencies used for public works and highway department communications will be used as a town channel, especially during the evenings and weekends when the department is normally closed. Pay attention to the PL/DPL/NAC as it is often different than what the public works department is using.

A town channel will often not be licensed at all. I know of at least one town that has 154.5700, 154.6000, and 151.625 MHz. programmed into their radios as private unit to unit chat channels. The first two frequencies were low-power business band channels, and are now Part 95 MURS channels. The third frequency is an often pirated business band channel used for Itinerant use. These are commonly used frequencies that are always worth putting in a scan bank. On the UHF side you will find 464.5000 and 464.5500, along with with the mobile side 5 MHz. up used for the same purposes, along with the frequencies allocated for GMRS. The Spectrum Sweeper (Close Call for Uniden scanners and Signal Stalker for Radio Shack) function on a scanner is also very useful for finding otherwise unlisted town channels located in odd places of the spectrum if you are within 1000 feet or so of the transmitter.

Once you have a list of frequencies, program them into your scanner and listen for at least a week. If you can, listen at different times during the day. If there is a severe weather warning you will definitely want to listen at that time. Set your scanner to decode PL/DPL/NAC, but don't set PL/DPL/NAC squelch. A town that uses a frequency for different purposes will often set a different PL/DPL/NAC for town channel communications than what the primary agency uses on the frequency. A frequency licensed by multiple towns in an area could have a different PL/DPL/NAC for each town and one for mutual-aid purposes. Pay attention to the PL/DPL/NAC when you hear traffic on the frequency. Note down the use of multiple PL/DPL/NACs on the same frequency, and pay close attention to the type and nature of radio traffic under each individual PL/DPL/NAC being used.

Many times the town public works/highway department frequency will serve as the town channel. They may or may not have a different PL/DPL/NAC for town channel communications than for public works/highway department communications. That is why you set PL/DPL/NAC decode instead of PL/DPL/NAC squelch. If the town does run separate PL/DPL/NACs for each function you will have an extra piece of metadata to help you identify the frequency's different users/functions. Sometimes they use a single PL/DPL/NAC so you will have to pay attention to the nature of the communications on the frequency. A public works/highway department will talk about specific things related to their work. Said department will also be a M-F 9-5 operation unless the weather requires them to work after hours. If you hear traffic on the local public works/highway department frequency after hours, and the communications don't seem to be about town infrastructure, then you've probably found a town channel.

Some town channels are going to be obvious. If you live in a rural town that has a volunteer fire department dispatched by the county or a dispatch service, a small part-time police department assisted and dispatched by the sheriff or state police, a highway department that most likely has a significant number of employees who are also volunteer fire fighters, and has one frequency (or repeater pair) licensed to it, then that frequency is going to be a town channel.

Here in parts of New England there has been a trend towards multi-agency state-run trunking systems that are running P25 Phase 2 with encryption capability. This puts the communications monitor into a situation where they need to buy an expensive and complex to program piece of equipment that can be rendered useless with the flip of a switch. Many towns who decide to use a state-owned trunking system keep a back-up conventional repeater just in case something happens that prevents them from using the state's trunking system. Fortunately said back-up systems, the town channels, can be monitored with that old $5 Radio Shack scanner you picked up at a radio swap.

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