I'm back, been up for 17 hours now, bedtime. As far as radio goes a pretty boring fire really.
One thing to note. Initially they tried to use CDF command 2 which has a repeater right on the mountain the fire was burning up (Oregon Peak). However due to two issues it was not usable so they ended up using Banner Mountain (command 1) which is a long ways off. But it worked ok because the fire being so high on Oregon Ridge it got out everywhere. And there was all sorts of nuisance traffic you could hear on the different channels at the same time at different times of day.
Anyway the reason command 2 did not work even though it was so close it was actually threatened by the fire, is two fold. First off there is a repeater that intermittently, but frequently, throws a dead carrier and has been for years at all times, summer and winter. Is there anybody at state DGS reading this? It might be a good thing to track down and fix. You don't have to listen too long to hear it.
Second, when you are high up on a ridge and key up command 1 or 2, often (maybe even usually) you will be hitting more than one repeater with that tone since they were all put in place back when there were only 8 tones. For instance command 2, tone 2 does Oregon Peak but I think it also was hitting Mt Zion, and possibly Mt Jackson or South Fork. All these repeaters keyed at the same time interfere and make it totally unusable. This also happens when they have a fire in Placer County and try to use command 2 tone 4 or 5. So basically the only one usable in this area is command 1 tone 4 off Banner. If your fire is not in that area communications will be pretty bad usually. It would not be too hard to fix this by reassigning tones 9-15 to these repeaters instead of only 1-8, so that their coverage does not overlap so badly. Again, is there anyone that can bend an ear at DGS. It has been this way for years here.
Birken
