The two week narrowbanding transition period for users of the county-wide VHF fire paging channel began yesterday morning. The new narrowband fire channel (155.5500 MHz) is now being actively used for alerting by four of our dispatch centers.
Due to narrowbanding, some Butler County fire agencies are looking to organize a group purchase of the Minitor V fire pager. Previous versions of this Motorola product (Minitor I through IV) are not narrowband capable and will need to be replaced before 2013.
Narrowbanding is an FCC-mandated change that applies to all VHF High Band (150-174 MHz) and UHF (420 to 512 MHz) systems.