rnli radio/pager

Scanning radio frequencies in Wales
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tottenham773
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rnli radio/pager

Post by tottenham773 »

hi all,

my first post on here, need some help. What kind of scanner do i need to buy to pick up the rnli? once i have brought a scanner how would i program the freq in?

anyway thanks for looking and for your help

kind regards
Hizan
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Re: rnli radio/pager

Post by Hizan »

Hi there,
The RNLI operate, when deployed, on the marine frequencies between 156.0 and 160.975 MHz. Here is a useful list of frequencies and the channel numbers which they are assigned to on the VHF marine band.
They can normally be heard on channel 0 (156 MHz) where operations take place and they communicate between land stations and you might hear them on any of the working frequencies or channel 16 (156.8 MHz - calling and distress simplex channel), however I'm not sure of any private frequencies which the RNLI might use or any pager frequencies which they use. They might even be using the national pager frequencies.

When it comes to buying a scanner you might want to look for one with two VFOs, meaning you'll be able to listen to two frequencies at the same time, because a lot of the marine channels are operated in duplex mode meaning that one person transmits on one frequency and the other transmits on the other frequency and they listen visa-versa (ie, channel 19 is duplex, 156.950/161.550 MHz).
You'll also want the scanner to cover the maritime band, of course, make sure it's able to receive FM as everything on the VHF marine channels is transmitted on FM and you'll want decent filtering capabilities, I imagine, as the bottom part of the maritime band is very close to pagers and the like. If you want to receive private communications they might operate on UHF (or they might not) so you might want to take that into consideration when buying a scanner.

Programming frequencies into scanners varies from model to model, brand to brand so it's best to check up on the manual but it's normally the case that the more modern scanners have memory slots so you can store and then recall the frequencies which you have stored, some scanners will allow you to add a title to the memory slot instead of just viewing a frequency, like I have marine channel 0 (156.0 MHz) stored in a memory slot in my radio and when I navigate to it it comes up with the title I assigned it, "CH 0."

Cheers.
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