RCS South down?

[Stringer619]

I had one of my scanners running for a few hours on RCS South but only had fire dispatches and interops/emerg/swat/etc scanning. I wasn't really paying attention to it. After an hour or two of scanning, I heard a dispatcher come over LE BLUE 1 announcing that all agencies can switch back to their normal talkgroups. I then realized.. hmm.. it's been a while since I heard any radio traffic.

Was the RCS South down for maintenance/outage or was traffic just non-existant (slow night)?
What did everyone switch to? VHF/UHF? North RCS?

This sparks a good question. In the event that the RCS (south, north or east) "went down", however unlikely, what would public safety officials do? Are there VHF/UHF backups? Simplex? For example, if fires destroyed some of the towers or terrorists (haha) took them all down? Are there mobile wide-area repeaters/trailers available to be deployed? I believe CALFIRE has a large repeater on one of their trailers for major wildfires.

 

[Anderegg]

The entire South Zone went into what communications experts (me!) call "Fail-hard" just after midnight. Dispatchers attempted to notify units on Blue 1 and other Mutual Aid talkgroups, but these transmissions only went out on the other sites. All mobile and handheld radios went silent......no indicators, they just ceased to receive or transmit.

The Blue 1 calls told units to switch to the conventional zone in their radios, switch to repeater mode, and attempt to cal in on the ICS tac channels. I switched over to those, but never heard a peep, probably because none of the units could hear the call!

El Cajon PD switched to LE North Tac 3 and operated on that until comms returned around 2:45 AM. harbor PD could be heard on SDPD Tac 6, and various other agencies popped up on north, and I am assuming random east site talkgroups. most of the comms probably went to MDT's as a default response.

Paul

 

[Stringer619]

Harbor PD switching to the SD City system makes sense, but El Cajon PD on LE North Tac 3? I'd imagine they'd switch to their conventional (El Cajon PD has an old conv freq). I can't believe their handhelds can reach the north towers.

 

[Anderegg]

Officers were reporting "out of range" indications on their radios.........

....for some strange reason, the only people able to transmit on the system were UCSD Thorton Hospital Security....who kept doing radio checks all night.....maybe the RCS people were just using their talkgroup. but they have their own pool of channels.

The control channel worked fine, the system and site showed up on my 396XT, and Motorolas affiliated and showed no sign of a problem....very strange.....

Paul

 

[mike619]

Heard sheriff on SDMARS last night.