Orange County, CA Fire Department Reverses Encryption Decision

[tsalmrsystemtech]

So this is what happened with OCFA and surrounding OC agencies with the fire department talkgroups that went encrypted. There was a big push and a timeline for OCSD to switch over to the NextGen P25 TRS system. Each APX radio was manually programmed with all of the old zones and the new P25 zones which is still in the existing radios as of today.

I believe and might need to be corrected but the infrastructure was not put into place last June of 2019 and they scrambled and just threw everybody on the new system including fire. Even before like six months before the system went to the NextGen TRS system those new APX radios were bought which were like 7K radios give or take and they were manually programmed with the old system that was still in service and new zones were added for all of the fire agencies to be strapped with AES-256 without OTAR and OTAP enabled. The majority of OC fire agencies were still using XTS 3000 and 5000 Motorola radios so all of the fire agencies all got new APX radios.

So when the OCFA Chief wanted to reverse the encryption it should of been fairly easy maybe or maybe not with OTAR and this could of been done in a time of several weeks or so or a couple of months in waves. So its been 14 months now and nothing has changed.

Now with the county and this whole COVID-19 on-top of everything the county is probably going thru a short fall of a lack of tax payer dollars and the Chief did not realize the challenges of reversing encryption. Most likely instead of re-programming 10K radios most likely they will have to get OTAR and OTAP in place and then not have to manually re touch each radio.

 

[tsalmrsystemtech]

I had to search deep and hard thru all of my older emails and recent ones. This email is straight from OCFA and surrounding agencies in regards to the challenges and what is laid down moving forward with the reversal of the encryption. So when you go back and look at Twitter The Chief is on board with this task and its just going to take longer time than what was expected. Chief officers are not radio technical individuals. So to make changes across the board and hand touch thousands of radios is a big task and labor time and costs are taking into account when round table meetings occur with The OC Fire Chiefs. Some people have mentioned a Go Fund Me page. I bet we can get this resolved quickly if needed and donations, but not sure if legally that could happen. But it would be a great idea.

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What I have found out is that the encryption topic has been addressed through the Orange County Fire Chiefs Association as well as Orange County Consolidated Communications (OCC) which is part of the OC Sheriff’s Department. The challenge of removing encryption to fire service radios is a larger task than the fire agencies in Orange County were initially made aware of by OCC. The fire agencies within Orange County have been able to broadcast tactical radio frequencies un-encrypted through a web browser that can be accessed through broadcast. Although these frequencies are not available via scanner, these feeds are available today to the public via web browser or phone applications until a time in the future when we have a better option to remove encryption from all of the fire service radio channels in Orange County.



Currently, OCC is working with the Orange County Fire Chiefs Association to provide different options to remove encryption from the fire service radios without creating an unnecessary financial burden on all agencies that currently have fire frequencies loaded into their radios. OCC does not yet have a time frame in which this process would be completed.



Further, when Chief Fennessy originally made the decision and request to un-encrypt OCFA radios he was unaware of the challenge to make this happen quickly.

 

[EMTJD]

Not true.…There are no existing switches to flip.

"Flipping a switch", that was a euphemism. Not to have been taken literally. One day, I'm hearing them… next day, I'm not, and never have since. It was "as if" someone had "flipped a switch". Obviously more was involved than that.