Pioneer Fire Radio Cloning Corruption 2016

During the check-in process on the Pioneer Fire, a Firefighter stops at the communication tent to get his radio cloned. This incident was split into two branches. A full radio group was assigned to each branch. The Radio Operator took the radio and hooked it up to the master radio for cloning. This was the first time either had heard of a DPHX radio with the capability of having more than 25 groups. Baffled by the discovery of “Group 44” in the radio, the Radio Operator checked to see how many groups the radio had. It was discovered that the radio had 99 groups. The Radio Operator had never seen a radio with 99 groups.

The Communications Tech explained that having 99 groups was the result of a virus that was introduced into the radio programming system around 2010 and was identified in 2011. This virus resulted from the use of certain sub-standard USB/DB9 computer interface devices. Some of the USB/DB9 interfaces do not handle the data transfer properly between the computer and the DPHX radios. Data is corrupted during the data transfer, resulting in a corrupted memory and “group selection” data.

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