yeah those "Cmd 1 and 4" certainly are out of the federal pool. The 172.550 has popped up a few other places as NIFC Command 37, including the King Fire now. Haven't seen 173.0625 anywhere on my chicken scratch notes of years past.
And I'm a bit frustrated that the COML for that 205 did not use the proper names for those 4 Command channels. That's a safety no-no.
I would politely disagree that the comm plan has a safety no no. I've been on some very large fires with 9 weeks of work on three fires that exceeded 150,000 acres. The most notable of those was the North Fork fire at Yellowstone National Park and on the Targhee National Forest in 1988 as it was approximately 500,000 acres. All of these large fires involved a multiple command repeaters set up and linked by 400 MHz frequencies. The North Fork Fire had two command nets each with more than one repeater. One net was for use on the east side and one on the west side. The line between the two was defined by assigning nets by Branches.
There was only one group of 14 channels in the Kings I was issued during my career. Radios now have enough to have the NIFC command frequencies pre programmed. In that case, if the only frequencies being used were the command nets, then I would agree with you. But the way groups are programmed for use on home units may not be convenient for use on an extended attack fire. The home unit group programming may pair up certain tac frequencies with corresponding command frequencies in groups that are usually used for the initial attack or the first portion of the extended attack period. During this period it is typical to have one or more mutual aid agencies on scene. Frequencies of those agencies might be included in the same groups command and tactical frequencies are located. These groups may not pair up the commands and tacticals in the same way they are used on incidents away from the home unit. Using the home unit groups could involve an incident pairing up of a tactical frequency located in one group with a command frequency pair in another group as programmed in the home unit radios. Switching between groups requires at least one more step and doing so is not practical or effective. Division supervisors have to do this the most as they are members of the command structure, but also supervise the tactical resources on the division, who are all assigned a tac channel. Division Sups need to be able to scan both channels and if they are in separate groups I don't believe it is possible to do so.
As a result at least one group is left empty and reserved for cloning at large incident scenes. Cloning is absolutely required when the fire uses frequencies from the unassigned/unused federal frequency pool as no one has them in memory. The comm plan is installed and the command repeaters are numbered to match the order they are in on the comm plan. The frequencies are not as important as the channel assignments and the temporary names they are given. People use the cloned channel plan to when referring to the frequencies they switch to by channel number rather than by name, and if they do use the name they use the names on the comm plan. Since the command frequencies are all linked together and temporary use frequencies could be used, it is less confusing to label them "Commands" 1 through whatever number of frequency pairs being used. I've not come across a comm plan that doesn't have the commands at the top of the channel order. Thus Command 1 corresponds to channel 1 on cloned radios. Given radios are cloned to match the comm plan exactly as written, no one is confused that Command 2 on their radio is actually NIFC Command 1. No one really looks at the frequencies being used, they just use the channel numbers and maybe the name shown on the comm plan, which is easier and less confusing.
The comm plan shown above is identical with those I saw on incidents during my career and since. This includes using incident assigned names for frequencies, irrespective of their NIFC system name. On some fires I've seen the tactical channels numbered 1-4 with no correlation to NIFC names.
I've used the command channels several times on fires and this is how I remember the procedures used. It was necessary to use adjacent division's tac channels to coordinate with other hand crews or other resource kinds. The procedure most often used was to was to refer to the tac channels as "Division J tac," "channel 11" and rarely as "R5 Tac 5" per the comm plan shown above.
This is the case on extended attack fires where all the radios are cloned to the same program.
Now in the case of fires involving mutual aid resources where an incident management team has yet to assume command and before a NIFC radio cache system is set up, the various agencies have to use frequencies referred to by name as they are almost always in different locations in differing agency radios. If this is the situation I agree with you. Frequency use related traffic is supposed to follow a format of stating a frequency's name followed by the numbers. Example "air to ground forty one, 1-6-7 decimal 4-7-5-0."
To avoid confusion agencies in southern California often duplicate the most frequently used group of neighboring jurisdictions and include them verbatim in their radios. A friend of mine came to visit several years ago, he was working on the Angeles at the time and he brought the handheld issued to him so I could take a good long look at how it was set up. There was a group for each of the other National Forests in southern California. The groups were named "San Berdo," "Cleveland" and "Los Padres." They may have been named using the 3 letter identifier, with groups named "BDF," "CNF" and "LPF." I don't remember which. Given the different configurations of mutual aid responses there isn't enough memory in radios to accommodate enough groups in the same manner. In this case the scenario in the last paragraph is presented and this is where your comment is absolutely valid.