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what is cdf doing today on command 2 on the 800 system i have been hearing them all day like they are working some kind of incident.

What you are hearing on CDF CMD 2 is a patch from CDF VHF to the 800 system as part of the described drill in Ramona. Created by OES communications technicians 318 and W6PIX.

Every year several battalion and division chiefs get together and put on the Interagency Wildland Fire Drill. The purpose of the drill is for fire agencies in Southern California (some have come from as far north as Laguna Beach), to work together in learning the latest in fighting wildland fires. Some of the agencies have never fought wildland fires, only structure fires.

There are several stations during the wildland drill: hose lay, structure protection, entrapment, dozers, etc. The three days of the drill gives each fire agency the ability to send a team from each shift to practice their skills.

yeah, i heard a bunch of the SD brush rigs coming back into service from an exercise this afternoon, guess this was it.

The drill was Mon, Tue and Wed. It is over for Ramona.

The final day is in Julian on Sat.

yeah, i heard them all day they sounded like that they had setup an incident command system. also i was monitering them on CDF local VHF and the 800 system i also saw 1463 out of station 3 in san marcos getting ready to head for the drill on wed. i was wondering why did they patch the 800 system with the CDF VHF local and how would they do that.

i was wondering why did they patch the 800 system with the CDF VHF local and how would they do that.

Well you asked the right person. My unit (OES TCOMM) used a device called the JPS-1000 ( http://www.jps.com/index.asp?node=88 ) to provide the patch.

This device has 6 radios installed in its present configuration (2 VHF, 2 UHF, 2 UHF-HI, 1 LO BAND VHF, 1 800Mhz Conventional). Plus connectors for 2 800 Mhz XTS 3000 or 5000.

The JPS can take any one of the radio sources and patch them together or in multi-select combos as well. It can even patch telco lines or cellular phones into a radio system.

This was just an exercise, there was no real need to use 800 on the drill. All of the units from local cities that didn't have VHF borrowed BK's from our cache. However, the patch was, as the entire drill was, an exercise to keep sharp (for us) on setting up the patches among other things. A real-world example would be if, on a big fire, let's say some FF'ers from a city that was 800 and didn't have any VHF. We could take one of the 800 conventional channels that they have in their radios and allow them to operate on CDF Command and Tacs. It's all about inter-operability. That's the new buzzword in government these days.


KGTV was out there and did a package on the drill, with a quick statement from our boss.

http://www.10news.com/video/9235563/index.html

Here are pictures of LAST YEARS drill. This years will take a few days.

http://www.seanwolfe.net/Drill%20Web/index.htm

that's pretty trick.

Pics turned out great Sean. Too bad I could'nt work the drill it looks like OES and AMR were sitting right next to each other.

Hello, I saw Sean is using the JPS-1000. If your a Ham (I guess you don't have it be one) you can build your own. I use the Asterisk PBX with the RPT. Check out:
http://allstarlink.org

I run a UHF repeater at home using the AllStarLink hardware.

David