Cleveland National Forest New Forest Net

[Teotwaki]

That weeks-long SCE failure a few months ago was not on the rough terrain, but instead caused by a TC down on the paved road at the bottom of the hill, not far from the substation, IIRC.

[Add] Looks like it was about a week, in June 2023. How time flies.

Santiago Peak power

Does anyone know anything new about the power failure at Santiago Peak, apparently caused by a traffic collision with a power pole down the hill somewhere? SCE opened the ticket at 0011 on 2023-05-27 and it sat on "Step 1: Outage reported" until today, over 7 days later, when it changed to "Step...

forums.radioreference.com

Yup. That slowdown was both govt and SCE at fault.

However, today’s situation is a different outage and terrain is a big factor

 

[ramal121]

On Cleveland Forest Net there is now a single (under 1000Hz) tone after key up. Don't yet know if it is just Santiago. It can be heard on the link (406.525) too. Will measure the tone's frequency a little later. I think it commenced after the Airport fire started to spread.

When does the tone come up? Generally if back up power is being used it sounds a beep at intervals during a transmission. It would go down the link also to give dispatch or whoever's on the far end a heads up. This is not a PTT release tone (ye ol' roger beep) that is used for a different purpose.

If a site switches from utility to generator the repeater doesn't sense this (unless there is a special configuration or something) and won't send a power loss warning. It will sense a loss of AC and a switch to battery which will trigger the warning. Now I'm speaking in general operational terms and anything can be rigged up to make a special configuration.

If the generator has indeed run out of fuel and the repeater is on battery, those beeps mean that there needs to be a site visit very soon.

 

[Teotwaki]

When does the tone come up? Generally if back up power is being used it sounds a beep at intervals during a transmission. It would go down the link also to give dispatch or whoever's on the far end a heads up. This is not a PTT release tone (ye ol' roger beep) that is used for a different purpose.

If a site switches from utility to generator the repeater doesn't sense this (unless there is a special configuration or something) and won't send a power loss warning. It will sense a loss of AC and a switch to battery which will trigger the warning. Now I'm speaking in general operational terms and anything can be rigged up to make a special configuration.

If the generator has indeed run out of fuel and the repeater is on battery, those beeps mean that there needs to be a site visit very soon.

Th new tone only comes up at unkey and only on the Santiago repeater which is where commercial power for the hill was lost. Anecdote: When a Motorola Quantar repeater with DC power revert option has lost AC power you can program the repeater to produce a tone at unkey. So the USFS repeater can be on batteries plus have a generator on site. If the genset fails the repeater falls back to DC power and uses the programmed unkey tone. I have a Quantar set up this way for on group on Santiago.

 

[Teotwaki]

Today's update - Adding Lookout 68 at High Point, stated they were using tone 5 (Cuyamaca). Lookout 22 was also present.

320R
Black Eagles, Sequoia NF Tribal Crew/Hotshot Wildland Crew (says the Internet)
Brush 288
Camp 31
Comms 22, 26, 27, 28, 29
2Charles1 (Patrol Captain)
2Edward 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12
Engineer 325
Field 31
2King 1 & 5 (canine units)
Lookout 03, 41, 50, 51 57, 62 (Palomar), 10, 21, 86, 87 (KCB591 Boucher Hill), 13, 22, 33, 34, 38, 39, 64, 68 (High Point poss KFX215)
Marauders, IA crew from Antelope Valley
Mountaineer arriving at Alpine
Patrol 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 31, 33, 34, 41, 42
Prevention 24
Ranger 2
Rec 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 31
Trails 21, 25
2Tom 2 (LEO Trainee)
Utility 28, 36