It is imperative that your personnel are aware of this safety notification.

This alert applies to all Fire service and EMS service P800 and P801 portables, and law enforcement portables that are configured to use the A/B toggle switch to force VTAC engagement

On Thursday June 7, 2007 two West Shore Regional police officers could not communicate on their P801 portables during an altercation with a subject wanted for questioning. Following the incident it was discovered both portables had the A/B toggle switch in the B position. West Shore Regional portables are configured for the A/B toggle switch to force VTAC connection. It is believed these switches were bumped to the B position during the altercation with the subject.

On portables configured for the VTAC engagement function, it is important to remember when the toggle switch is moved to the B position; it removes the radio from the county network to either “wake up” a VTAC that is in standby mode, or connect to a VTAC already in operation with a portable or portables attached. If a VTAC is not in standby mode (VTAC repeater mode rocker switch turned on) the portable cannot communicate if the toggle switch is in the B position. The only way a portable can communicate is moving the switch back to the A position to re-register with the County network.

There is a known software bug that resides within the mobile radios and control stations (station radios). M/A-Com has identified the problem and is hopefully going to provide a fix very soon. We have not had any confirmation on a timeline as of this memo. As soon as we hear something we will pass it along.

The software bug will cause the mobile radio (regular mobile or VTAC) and control station to just reboot at will. You will see WARNING! NO MRU on the display. It will reboot itself or if you catch it you can manually power cycle the radio to get it back sooner.

This has been raised to the highest level as it is not only frustrating but can cause operational problems depending on what situation you are in.

Apparently the problem has to do with the conversion to four slot technology which basically doubled the capacity of the system. We can handle twice as many talk paths at one time. There is a buffer (memory bank) within the control head that seems to fill up and then it doesn’t know what to do next so it quits communicating with the main radio within the vehicle (MRU – mobile radio unit) or control station that is connected by the can-bus cable (very small diameter cable linking the control head to the radio unit). Once the communication is lost the radio simply reboots itself to clear the problem.

We have stressed this with our management here within the County and have passed this along to M/A-Com as well.

Once the fix is completed, tested, and approved there may be a chance we will perform this fix “over-the-air”. There will still need to be some coordination as the mobile radio will still need to be powered on to accept any updates and/or software but it will be less stress as each station will not need to be visited and the radio touched. There is always a chance a radio fails to accept the update and will still need touched but the success rate has been very high within the Commonwealth when performing OTA updates. Plus the fact it can be completed sooner.

If you have any questions reference this bug please don’t hesitate to call our office at (717) 240-6400 and speak with Doug Glass or myself (Brian Hamilton).