The determination of daily usage or occupancy in the land-mobile band 138-174 MHz at Montreal

The monitoring of signal levels in the land-mobile bands over a period of 10 consecutive days shows that the base-station levels remain constant within + or - 2dB and can be used for isolating station occupancy from that due to mobiles. It is shown that a monitoring period of 4 to 5 days gives reliable estimates of the mean daily occupancy and the 75% level of the cumulative distribution of occupancies measured in 5, 30 or 60 minute periods. Only a few of the frequencies show a systematic difference of occupancy between the morning and afternoon values and it is found that there is no statistical difference between the occupancy of a frequency monitored for 5 minutes every 10 minutes and for 5 minutes every 30 minutes.