Any personal experience with the interference caused on the 800 mhz fcc public safety band by Sprint Nextel?
May 28, 2010 by MrAuthor
Filed under Public Safety
So Sprint Nextel is supposed to stop using the frequency that Nextel is on by mid next year. The reason is that it is causing interference on police, fire, and other public safety radios. I am REALLY curious to know exactly what this interference is. Is it just static? Can you hear voices of people using their Nextels? Do you get it all the time or just certain times or areas of the city? There are never any more details in the news articles except for "causes interference". Thanks!
I’m not sure.
Most emergency public safety radios use some sort of signal transfer to avoid that. It’s called trunking. Trunking means that the signal shifts within that 800 MHz wavelength. The signal is constantly changing. I would imagine that people using Nextel signals would never know the difference if they were interfering with emergency public safety radios. The public safety radios are probably getting some sort of static, interrupted by cell phone conversations, or interrupt in service which is why Nextel is trying to get out of the 800 MHz range.
The Nextel user wouldn’t notice the interference, but it could be causing a lot of problems for emergency frequencies just because of the technology that they use.