Bucks county encryption

[joeyperillo]

That was a tough stretch......I may start going to church again.....

 

[phillydjdan]

Pray for transparency 🙏

 

[Engine225]

Hope you had happy holidays everyone

 

[sta18ff]

Bad news for PD zones.....

 

[Ryanwr944]

Plus fire and ems somehow they got enough money to go full encryption

 

[maus92]

Plus fire and ems somehow they got enough money to go full encryption

Inaccurate and misleading.

 

[sta18ff]

Semi accurate, they got money to be able to be encrypted, but they (currently) do not have plans to encrypt them, just to allow them to monitor the encrypted PD channels.

 

[maus92]

Semi accurate, they got money to be able to be encrypted, but they (currently) do not have plans to encrypt them, just to allow them to monitor the encrypted PD channels.

It's semi-accurate but we need to be precise.

 

[phillydjdan]

Just so everyone knows, the county will be turning encryption on for the police channels again on Thursday morning based on perceived threats relating to the events in DC. It is widely believed that this should be temporary, like previous times they have done this. As of this morning the techs that would be required to upgrade fire/EMS radios have not touched any radios from my agency, so they are not prepared to make this permanent. I should also add that the flash upgrade process is very time-consuming and likely will take weeks or months to complete once the team is assembled and prepared to do so. Every single radio needs to be physically touched. My personal opinion is that likely won't be completed until summer. But in any event, we will go dark for awhile until the political climate calms down.

 

[trentbob]

Dan, you beat me to it. I can confirm also Thursday 8 a.m. and the reason is potential civil unrest. This is just scuttlebutt on the street for me. Hopefully the alterations on fire and EMS radios will not be complete for a while and it will come back on before the final curtain.

 

[Ryanwr944]

It sucks in a few months we will no longer hear fire and ems

 

[trentbob]

There are no plans to encrypt fire and EMS... only police. The changes being made to EMS and fire radios is so that they can hear the Bucks County Police after they go encrypted so as to have situational awareness. Full-time police encryption was being held off until all fire and EMS radios designated could be altered to hear encryption. That process will take awhile, I know that you quoted the end of January but I think it's going to take much longer.

This episode starting Thursday at 8 a.m. is felt to be temporary in response to potential civil unrest. Each time they do this it takes a few weeks to come back. During the summer riots it was three weeks even though Bucks County did not have any riots. Lots of misinformation has been floating around these threads recently.

We try to only post information when it can be confirmed in the name of accuracy so as people are not misinformed.

 

[phillydjdan]

It sucks in a few months we will no longer hear fire and ems

@Ryanwr944
FOR THE LAST TIME.
FIRE AND EMS ARE ***NOT*** GOING DARK!
STOP SAYING THAT.
IT IS NOT TRUE.
YOU ARE SPREADING FALSE INFORMATION.
STOP DOING THAT.

 

[W7FDX]

Just to try to clear up this information regarding Tac channels.

When Bucks County went to the new P2 simulcast system in 2015 and we realized that the x36 did not work well or at all in the lower part of the county, and obviously Whistler radios didn't work a lick, news media types like myself and others got apx7000s so we could monitor the system. By the way, the SDS radios work great on Bucks County on either invert or wide invert filter depending on your location and environment.

Again, I listen all day everyday, I monitor Zones 1, 2, 3, 5 + 8. Tac channels 1 through 5 are in the clear and are never encrypted. When the system started, SWAT team channels were encrypted exclusively and still are.

Later the Ops channels were added, each Zone has their own Ops Channel which is fully encrypted.

Again, other than officers now being allowed to encrypt a transmission if they feel they want to there really isn't any changes coming to Bucks County according to the last time I spoke with someone who's very close to the system and that was recently. When I started hearing encryption on the Zone channels intermittently he was the first one I went to to ask what was going on. LOL

The bottom line is no worries in Bucks County other than an occasional transmission that the officer feels is too sensitive and doesn't want the public to hear. I've noticed it's often S units which makes sense.

It's true that most of the zones in Bucks County are pretty sedate except for Zone 1 and Zone 8... Zone 2 gets pretty dicey sometimes also but Zone 1 and Zone 8 are pretty busy with serious calls, lots of excitement everyday. That murder in fleetwing Bloomsdale area on Sunday night had quite a few transmissions in the clear including the track of the K-9... County detectives were involved and their TG is encrypted.

As far as Burlington goes I monitor P1, P3 and P4. Their new system is not up yet but it's getting closer.

Whoops it's 6:50 a.m. and a Bensalem officer just responded to the dispatcher encrypted, she was in the clear. LOL.

Just wondering if you know what type of encryption they are using? ADP (ARC4) or AES-256?

 

[Ryanwr944]

Sorry I must of misunderstood why their flashing the radios.

 

[trentbob]

Regarding the encryption I'm pretty sure I know the answer to that but in the name of accuracy I'm going to let Dan handle that. Should have an answer shortly.

 

[W7FDX]

Yes that makes sense to stay on the same frequency during an emergency. When they first got the apx radios it took people a long time to even go to Tac one. They definitely have a learning curve problem with the radios.

I was surprised the other night when that young girl was murdered in Bloomsdale, shot 6 times, everything was in the clear other than maybe the County detectives that we didn't know about. I have also heard Chief Henry in Bristol borough tell all units to switch over to Ops 1 and they operate on Zone 1 for dispatch but there's only a handful of cars involved.

Nothing worse than half the cars on one channel and the other half on the other. LOL.

Yep, on the SDS units I hear the garbling but on the apx 7000 you don't hear anything when it's encrypted.

You know when Bucks County switched to the type II smartzone system they had before this system they did it in the year 2000 long before digital scanners... I was working on staff at The Trentonian at the time.

The county did program our one Motorola radio for dispatch only but we didn't have the 4 tac channels so they would always switch over. It was almost three years before the Uniden BC 250d and the RadioShack rebranded GRE Pro 96 came out in 2003.

That was a very odd feeling for three years, I had no Bucks County Police radio at home. I was thrilled when the digital scanners came out.

They could have set up a button on their radios to automatically switch to the encrypted tac talkgroup with a single button press. Basically the same thing they do to turn encryption on and off.

 

[phillydjdan]

It is AES, not ADP.

And Ryan, the purpose of upgrading fire and EMS radios is so they can LISTEN TO police only. The police will be encrypted, but fire and EMS wouldn't be able to hear them unless they also had the same encryption in their radios. It is for RECEIVE only, NOT for transmit.

 

[trentbob]

They could have set up a button on their radios to automatically switch to the encrypted tac talkgroup with a single button press. Basically the same thing they do to turn encryption on and off.

The policy is now that any officer can throw the slide switch on the apx and encrypt any transmission they want. Then they returned to the clear. Tac channel 1 through 5 is always in the clear. They do have a permanently encrypted Ops Channel for each Zone that they could switch to at any time for an incident but the problem is most don't know how or takes too much time and not everybody gets the memo so it causes confusion.

 

[W7FDX]

The policy is now that any officer can throw the slide switch on the apx and encrypt any transmission they want. Then they returned to the clear. Tac channel 1 through 5 is always in the clear. They do have a permanently encrypted Ops Channel for each Zone that they could switch to at any time for an incident but the problem is most don't know how or takes too much time and not everybody gets the memo so it causes confusion.

I understand, I guess it just seems too simple for a radio nerd like me to turn a channel knob but under stress I can see how that could be an issue.