After a bit of research, I established that the report titled "NTIA Special Publication 98-36 SPECTRUM REALLOCATION REPORT" was from February 1998.
The report looked at who the existing users were in this part of the spectrum and whether some of the frequencies could be reallocated to commercial interests.
While the full report looked at several different bands, we'll concentrate on the low VHF spectrum here.
I have included sections of interest from the report below with certain key points highlighted in bold.
It might be worth pointing out that antennas for low band VHF tend to be very large compared to those for the higher VHF and UHF bands. For example, a full size quarter wave ground plane antenna is roughly 2.5 metres on 30 MHz and 2 metres on 40 MHz.
While the report is over 20 years old, it does show that even back then there was little commercial interest in the 30 to 50 MHz spectrum.
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SECTION 3 ASSESSMENT OF REALLOCATION OPTIONS
INTRODUCTION In the previous section, the bands to be considered for reallocation for non-Federal use were identified. All of the bands being considered for reallocation are used by the Federal Government agencies, in varying degrees, to support Presidential and Congressionally mandated missions. A band-by-band assessment of these factors is presented and recommendations are made as to which bands will be included in the spectrum reallocation plan.32-33, 34-35, 36-37, 38-39, AND 40-42 MHz
Band Usage
The Department of Defence (DoD) uses the frequency bands between 32-42 MHz for tactical communication using the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System (SINCGARS) and other land mobile radio (LMR) assets (e.g., Scope Shield II) as well as some non-tactical intra base radio functions.
