smokeybehr said:
Group 15 on the BK radios is always left empty as an incident-specific group, so that when units go off-forest (or out of unit in the case of CDF) they get the incident channels loaded into a spare bank.
I figured that one out but didn't have time the other day to state it or to list the repeaters. When we had 14 channel BK's without additional groups we would go to an incident or incidents and get our radios cloned at the incident communications unit or, as a crew boss, I would program my radio following the comm plan in the Incident Action Plan (IAP). I would then use the cloning cable that stayed in my truck and clone the rest of the crew's radios.
The limitation of only having 14 channels meant your home program was wiped out when you went to an incident and you would have to send them to the Forest Radio tech for reprogramming before you could use it. In my case I would just find another handheld when I got back and clone the crew's radios back to the home Forest. There was supposed to be a Forest Supervisor's list of people authorized to program radios but those in the know did it themselves. The radio tech raised a ruckus about this and threatened to bring all field programmables in and change the access code and then not tell anyone what it was. It didn't happen but if it had the radio tech had done so he told me I would get the code as long as I didn't pass it on to anyone. I was prepared to follow that direction as if I had given the code out he would have been forced to kill me! (ha).
Everyone who field programmed radios were very savvy about how they operated and mistakes were almost non-existent. The problem comes when someone programs a radio and makes a mistake such as being a MHz off with a repeater input frequency to Forest or Admin net. You then call dispatch and they don't answer. You may be talking on another agency's simplex or are within range of another agency's repeaters and you just happened to enter their input frequency in your radio. You can't hear them come back to you telling you nicely that you are on their net and to cease because you have your radio programmed to receive your home Forest. This is commonly known as having "mismatched repeater pairs." Occasionally the other agency figures out who was on their net and calls your Forest's radio tech and that person is not real excited about getting such calls. Then programming gets reined in for quite some time afterward.
I was a 20 day tour of fires one year as a crew boss on the Riverside Unit - CDF, Los Padres, San Berdo, and Angeles National Forests. Many of the resources on the first fire on the Los Padres were released and then went on to the San Berdo, and then many of us followed each other over to the Angeles. My first day back from work found at the crest of the Sierra near Mammoth Mountain where the view down the San Joaquin River drainage allows line of site all the way to the coast range. Our (Inyo NF) Mammoth Repeater can be worked from U.S. 101 in the Paso Robles area and can be worked with a handheld at the Federal Building in downtown Fresno. While I was up there a conversation between two fire units started on this repeater. The conversation involved two engines on I-5 and regarded the crew's opinions and observations of some women working the fires they had worked. This had been going on for at least 20 minutes when I figured out if the dispatcher wasn't going to do something about it I had to.
Knowing the Region's frequency use fairly well I thought about what could be happening as they did not answer my call to inform them they were broadcasting to our entire Forest, their observations of a few select females they had been around during the same tour my crew and I had been on. I concluded that the only way they could be keying the Mammoth Repeater (Tone 2) without hearing me was they were talking on our repeater input frequency simplex and happened to have their external tone box set on tone 2. I concluded this was part of the Klamath/Six Rivers engine strike team I had seen on a couple of the fires. At that time the Six River's repeater output frequency was the Inyo's repeater input frequency and two Six Rivers units were merrily driving along on what would be their Forest Net direct channel or channel 1 on USFS radios. At that point I looked at my radio's program and pulled up a seldom used group and was able to get on the Six River's channel 1 on my 50 watt mobile. I chose a tone on my tone box for a repeater I had no chance of hitting from the Minaret Summit area I was located at. I waited for the first pause in their traffic by listening to our repeater on our handheld. I made a blind call and spoke informally saying "Six River's engines - your direct Forest Net traffic is being carried over our Mammoth Repeater, and while we find your traffic about the anatomy of certain females somewhat amusing, it really should not be going over our Forest Net on the Inyo." I received no answer, but their traffic on our Mammoth Repeater stopped immediately and wasn't heard again.
In some official training materials the USFS was using at the time another mismatched repeater pair story was related to point out what can happen if you use home frequencies while traveling or had programmed your radio in error. It seems someone got on a federal frequency to chat between units and happened to be using the frequency that controlled the gates on a nearby dam, built and maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers. Supposedly the dam was on an older system where they transmitted CTCSS tones to a controller and it caused the dam gates to do certain things depending on what tone was transmitted. Supposedly these traveling units had their external tone box set on the "open dam gates" command which caused some problems downstream and set off alarms in the dam's control room. The consequences of this alleged incident were certainly greater than the unintentional broadcast of the opinions of female anatomy.
So, the message here is borrowed from the end Sergeant Phil's briefing to the station's shift. He always worked his way through all the items and said that was it. As the officers began to get up from their seats and move toward the door he would announce loudly "and hey, hey, lets be careful out there."
