The first round of frequency coordination is complete! There’s still a bit of work to do, but things look very promising.

Here’s what’s happened:

• I modified the code to pre-assign a frequency to counties that already have one planned (so that nobody needs to change). These counties are Benton, Boone, Bremer, Buchanan, Linn, Polk, and Story.
• I know for a fact that Linn and Polk have multiple frequencies planned. I don’t know how to do that in the code yet, so for this run, I have only one for each county.
• I set up the system to use ALL frequencies in the 146 and 147 MHz simplex segments, 15 kHz spacing, so there is a total of 26 from which to choose. I know Clint suggested a 30 kHz spacing, but due to the first bullet, that wasn’t feasible. I will have to nudge the assignments a little to bias to the bigger spacing, but things are not guaranteed.
• I then ran the code, and it was able to coordinate all counties using only 13 frequencies. This leaves room for multiple frequency assignments.
• Someone has suggested reserving a frequency for “mutual aid” in each district. This seems like a good idea given the results, so I’ll look into that as well.

So my to-do list for the weekend includes finding a way to handle multiple frequencies in a county and trying to fit spacing requirements a bit better.

Comments are welcome, and I’ve opened them up on this post. You should be able to comment without creating an account here, but to minimize spam, I’m going to have the comments moderated, so there may be a delay.

73,

Scott, N0GUD