The San Juan NF and CO-DRC zone are in exceptional drought conditions and are in extreme fire danger conditions. The zone has been in Stage 1 fire restrictions since May 1st and just went into Stage 2 June 1st. An Eastern Oregon Task Force ordered for severity arrived at the Columbine RD office on the morning of 5/31/2018 for their in briefing and to receive Columbine RD Fire group/zone radio clone. Because of the amount of WUI and the strong Mutual Aid agreements that are in place with local cooperators, the San Juan NF Fire groups/zones utilize User Code Guard (UCG)/ User TX Tone Picklist functionality in order to have all necessary federal and local channels accessible within a single group/zone. The Eastern Oregon Task Force mainly consists of BLM and have KNG-P150s handheld radios and KNG-M150 mobile radios. Upon receiving the clones and the channel plan for Columbine RD Fire, many personnel did not know what user select tones were, nor were their radios setup for to support this functionality. Columbine’s FMO tried to program picklist tones and/or activate UCG within their radio’s Keypad Programming Menu, but the option to do so had been removed from their radios or were not available due to very old firmware versions the radios were operating on. All of this is happening during Red Flag conditions, and finally the FMO called the San Juan NF Electronics Technician (ET) for assistance around 1230. We are in a unique radio model transitional period – currently we are seeing more KNG model radios being used in the fire organizations and after talking to some Task Force members, they mentioned that many of them just received these new types of radios (mainly the KNG-M150) in their engines/trucks and were not formally trained on how to use them. Most did not know how to clone to them (enter destination clone mode), or how or why the radios were setup the way they were. There has been and will continue to be instances similar to this, highlighting the NEED for a national standard for configuring KNG model handheld (KNG-P150s, KNG-P150, KNG2-P150) and mobile (KNG-M150, KNG-M150R) radios and picklist tones. It is just a matter of time before someone is hurt or killed because of this. |