Forest Service is now narrowband 12.5kHz compliant for 2004 Fire Season.
Forest Service radio is typical of any federal government system. They tend to do things a little differently than the norm. If you are new to USFS radio, then it can take a little getting used to, having law and fire on the same freq. Forests are typically large vast areas of land that require 5-8 repeaters to cover, and that still leaves plenty of dead spots that cause communication chaos. Unless you're on a mountain peak in the middle of the forest, you will typically only hear traffic that is coming over the nearby repeater. This causes lots of "walk-overs" as units on both sides of the forest try to talk at the same time to the dispatcher.
Forest Net is kind of a free-for-all net, not much discipline, at least for NorCal area forests. Campground hosts, law enforcement, fire resources, dispatch, etc. all are on the same channel. Most everybody has a radio ID, but campground hosts seem to have the least radio training. They won't understand to stay off the radio when a large fire is starting up. They also just kind of "show up" on the air to chit chat with another host. Good for laughs and I'm sure the dispatchers grit their teeth.
When a fire starts up, Forest net tends to get very strict since responding engines have to coordinate over the repeaters where to go. Sometimes only 2 engines will sit on a remote fire and they'll chitchat over Forest net instead of a tactical freq. No, I don't know why. If a larger, organized fire starts up with multiple units responding, they usually switch to one of the tactical frequencies. Very large "project" fires will utilize the area command frequencies and NIFC cache freqs.