Improved Mobile Telephone Service Update
"IMTS is alive and well in 2004. Whidbey Telephone still runs a VHF system in Washington State, and IMTS is available on both UHF and VHF in Bend, Oregon. Most of the remaining IMTS systems in the U.S. serve rural areas where cellular is not available. In some cases its used as a rural fixed service where people can use IMTS for their home telephone."
Rich Williamson W7KI
http://www.northwestradio.com (external link)
The status of IMTS has always puzzled me. I wrote to Rich and Geoff Fors to ask if the FCC database could give me a printout of operating IMTS systems. Geoff replied, "The FCC database isn't going to be too accurate because a lot of the licensees are holding onto the channels but not actually using them for IMTS."
He continues, "I am surprised Whidbey Telephone Company (WTC) is still using IMTS since there is no support whatever from any manufacturer. I am also under the impression that Whidbey has cell phone coverage anyway. Very often the telephone companies themselves were the largest users of their IMTS systems after cellular became widespread. I can tell you for sure that the low band Bell MTS manual service is gone, in that the FCC auctioned the channels off some months ago (at least in the Western USA.)"
"The Pacific Northwest always had a high concentration of IMTS car telephone systems compared to the rest of the country, and Canada always had a lot. I don't know what is going on in Canada today with VHF IMTS but they had (have?) a somewhat advanced IMTS system that had a receiver signal strength comparator to automatically force the radio to change channels as you drove from one area to the next."
"I have been trying to buy one of the smaller IMTS switches on ebay to create an experimental system, but a friend in New Jersey always beats me to them. At some point I hope to have Henry Kissinger or Jesse Jackson negotiate a truce between us so that I might be able to win one of these terminals."