Telling firefighters that they have to "go to the talkaround channel" is ridiculous, and whoever says or suggests that has clearly never fought a fire. I'd love to see them try flipping a small switch or pushing a tiny button with bulky firefighting gloves on, with the radio inside a pocket or under a turnout coat, while completely blinded by darkness and smoke, with fire licking at their rear and crap falling down all around them, etc etc etc.
Agreed. That's why it would make more sense to have it established in protocol that they go to a simplex operations channel
prior to arriving on scene. Let command relay everything back to Cambria. Of course, the argument (at least where I'm from) is "well, then the fireground traffic isn't recorded". Around here, fireground traffic has been run through the city-countywide trunked system for years. When the system was upgraded from an analog SmartNet simulcast to P25 Simulcast, the fire departments started raising a fuss about using digital voice for firegrounds. This has been studied extensively by the NFPA and others, and is a separate topic beyond the scope of this post, however the simple solution would be to set up options for analog simplex channels for fireground operations. Of course, that "wouldn't work" because the traffic "couldn't" be recorded. Not true, it could be done in the incident commander's vehicle using a system similar to an in-car police video recorder, only for audio. Of course there doesn't seem to be such a thing (at least that I'm aware of) on the market. Long story short, there are no analog simplex firegrounds, and the fireground traffic all goes through the entire P25 Simulcast system just so one firefighter can talk to the guy a hundred feet away, and you guys think you have it rough with analog conventional repeaters! From a radio geek's standpoint, it is really stupid to go through a repeater when you're trying to talk to the guy right next to you, but in the commercial and public safety world, it happens all the time.
This is exactly the sort of tragic thing that happens when you get pencil pushing desk jockeys designing and approving radio systems. They become so drunk on their own Kool-Aid "amazing technology" that they ignorantly and arrogantly dismiss many of the shortcomings of these systems. To them, a 99% coverage saturation is a successful system. To the schmuck burning alive in the basement of that structure fire, that 1% is all that matters to him.
Its darn near impossible to implement a one hundred percent coverage system. That's why the users should be educated that there are other options for communication that don't rely on the infrastructure of the system. As stated above, it seems to me it would be prudent to establish simplex (direct radio-to-radio) firegrounds as a protocol and a standard procedure, rather than as the exception to the rule.
I agree with the Chief...the system failed.
No, the lack of knowledge is the real failure, not the system. It isn't really that much of a system anyway. Wow, a bunch of conventional analog repeaters, some of which simulcast. I wonder what that chief would think of a statewide mixed mode Motorola SmartZone Omnilink with a few simulcast cells thrown in here and there and the whole thing relying on leased line communications for it all to work properly? You guys don't know how easy you still have it!
Um We Didnt Have These Problems With Lowband Or Vhf.
You didn't have repeaters with low band or VHF either. As somebody once so eloquently said on this whole deal, "Welcome to the 1980s."
