Air Guard is monitered in every fire-fighting aircraft as an emergency hailing frequency, much like Marine Channel 16. If an aircraft can't be found on any other frequency, they will call on this frequency as a last resort. Definitely worth having in your fire-season scanner bank. Air Guard has some high-level remote bases for ground monitoring and remote transmissions.

Flight Following is typically used for aircraft transitioning between incidents or travelling long-distances. Aircraft being called on Air Guard will move to this frequency to talk further.

Smoke Jumpers like to hang on the 168.550 since it is a very quiet frequency. It is also the ICS Calling Frequency so it's fairly quiet.

Every tanker base should be monitored on 123.975 for general ramp operations etc. You'll hear pilots talking to the ramp operators telling where to load their tankers etc. The 163.100 freq is often referred to as "Deck" and is utilized primarily on federal fires with a temporary helibase (often) or tanker reload facility (rare).

Air to Ground is used for any aircraft talking to anybody on the ground. You will hear helicopters talking to their ground fire crews, or their ground support unit, or you'll hear air attack over an incident giving an update to the Incident Commander.

Air Tactics is for the radio traffic between Air Attack and the Air Tankers and copters fighting the fire. This is where you'll hear the air tankers setting up for their drops. Naturally, you can get a very good idea of the birds-eye view of the fire by the descriptions given by the aircraft.

When the airspace over a fire gets pretty busy, and the Air Tactics net becomes overloaded with traffic where it becomes a safety issue to have so many aircraft on a single frequency, Air Attack will request a Victor Net. This will unload a lot of traffic off the Air Tactics and onto a second frequency. In large fire cases, the Air Tactics becomes sort of the "Air Command" frequency and Victor Nets become the Air Tactics.

Initially Air Attack may move all of the helicopters off to their own Victor Net. Then a helicopter will become Helicopter Coordinator (Helco) and be in control of the copters while Air Attack worries about the air tankers. On a long-term fire, they'll typically give up their VHF air tactics back to initial attack elsewhere and switch the tankers to a second Victor Net.

My last "official" list of Victor Nets is 2006 and they have changed almost every year before that. Because of this, you will rarely hear a Victor Net be referred to by a name. Instead they will state the frequency. Pilots like to speak quick and succinct so you may only hear them say "nine two five" which would be 122.925 or "two five seven five" for 122.575. The star frequencies to the left indicate the primary Victor Nets for California fire response. In the past few years the starred freqs have had Victor 1, Victor 2 etc. assigned to them. I would scan these on a daily basis. When a larger fire starts up with lots of air resources, they could move to any one of those listed frequencies. You might dedicate a scanner bank just to the Victor Nets so you don't miss anything.

I will leave this section to the rule breakers. When all heck hits the fan, frequencies are pulled out of thin air at times for incidents that don't follow any of the "written" (or even unwritten) rules. This place will be for confirmed frequencies that I have heard on an incident for air use, but I have never seen labled or listed otherwise for air use.

I hope this helps stretch your mind as a scanner hobbyist, and makes you think out of the box. Sometimes you know there should be something talking over the radio, but you just can't find them. Start looking where you least expect them and 9 times out of 10, they'll be there.