Railfan Technology > Wouxum KG-UV8D help

Hello everyone , I just recently purchased a Wouxun KG-UV8D handheld radio and I just put the railroad AAR channels but I'm curious what steps are railroad channels programmed at, for example 5, 6.25, 10 etc. If I had the radio set to the wrong step, would it do anything to the reception ? Any help would be appreciated.

10 is what you need. Under the new narrow banding there are frequencies that are 2.5 which the UV8 will not do. Recommend the UV6 V2 which will do 2.5.....

I think all railroads have complied with the FCC mandate to "narrow band" their radios -- 12.5 kHz. What the radio's step is set to should have no effect in your reception.

Channels 1-7 have some odd spacing. They are AAR channels but not really used in the U.S.A. After that they have a 15KHz spacing. (0.015 MHz)

Example:
26 160.500 MHz
27 160.515 MHz
28 160.530 MHz

They were set up for 12.5KHz deviation but 6.125 KHz works fine. You would only notice that the volume was down with the narrow bandwidth.
When the railroads begin to use NXDN (digital) you'll only hear noise or a buzz.

John.

It's just my SWAG, but I'm guessing that in the railroad environment
digital is going to prove to be a big bust for fringe / weak signal
reception. We've all seen it on our digital TVs at home: that
checkerboard garbage that will occasionally show up. That's noise /
weak signal. I'm thinking that if I were on the ground passing signals
back and forth to an engineer / conductor, or getting orders from the
dispatcher, I'd want a strong signal, but weakish will work for analog.
Not so much with digital. I know the weak signal stuff is out there
because I hear it all the time. Our brains a pretty good at under-
standing weak analog, but digital will be just noise.

My 2 cents.

K6KMJ