The Siren Board

After that happened in Dallas, I told my brother it surprised me that it hasn’t happed sooner here in Franklin County since the activation protocol is pretty simple; just a fast dtmf without like an “arm” signal or any other safeguards I can think of. I would think many Whelen systems or anything using a two-tone or dtmf signal to activate would be vulnerable. Not sure what the fix would be unless they switch to a different activation method, but I don’t know how that works.

I live in Westerville and my brother lives in Dublin. Too far away to hear anything.

WPS4004Man wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2020 1:19 am

Does anyone know which siren it was?

There were a bunch of posts on Reddit about this. It appears to be in the Linworth area but I couldn't decipher a specific siren.

Well they’ve stopped testing the system for now, due to an “ongoing investigation”, whatever that means. Most likely they are updating their equipment to be more secure. Here’s the article: https://www.google.com/amp/s/abc6onyou ... -wednesday

From what I've seen and heard, they believe it was an issue with the siren itself. Some newer Whelen control panels have the tendency to activate themselves randomly. If it was just that one siren, it's likely the case. Knowing how blanketed the coverage over in that area is and the fact that in order to hack the system the person responsible would've likely set off one or two more sirens, I'm inclined to believe it was just that one siren having controller issues.

Normally I would agree, but they seem to know that it wasn't a controller failure. Happened 2 nights in a row, which makes the think it was malicious. And it stopped right after they came out with an article about it, which makes me think some idiot set it off and after reading the article stopped so they wouldn't be caught.

If it were, in fact, malicious, wouldn't more sirens in the area have gotten triggered? Unless the perpetrator was standing right next to the siren that was being activated, more sirens would've gone off. Judging by the fact that they were doing maintained on the unit at the time of the malfunction, that leads me to believe it was some sort of controller type issue.

Another thing that's come to mind is that system polling could've set the siren off. If the system was doing polling at the time of the malfunctions, some set of DTMF could've "confused" that siren's RTU into thinking it was the tones for a command, causing the siren to go off. I've heard of that happening in a few places.

They quite literally said that the perpetrator would have had to be really close to the siren to set it off. They performed maintenance after the first time it was set off, found nothing wrong, and it was set off again that night. Could you possibly give examples of the new Whelen controllers randomly activating? I’ve never heard about this, except maybe one on the older ESC-2020. Also why would they perform an investigation if they think it’s an equipment failure? Wouldn’t it be easier to replace the controller?

Welp I went to try and record the Lithopolis, OH Federal Signal Model 2 before it got replaced... and it failed. I think the old bird is done. I went to check the timer with my friend (who is also going to own the siren after it gets replaced) and we noticed it was taken out of the case. I am pretty sad to say I might've just missed my only chance to record that thing before they replace it. Also for you asking, the Model 2 will be replaced with one of Fairfield County's Ex Perry Nuclear WPS-3000's (which I had no idea they still had any in storage).

Here’s a 2030 that falsely activated itself in wail tone. And I still refute my claim that more sirens would’ve had to go off, even if the perpetrator were to be Standing right next to the siren.

https://youtu.be/VdJOzRj6Pr8

Baofeng scanners are relatively low power (8W max) and I highly doubt they would be able to transmit the distance to activate more than two units (unless you're near a repeater, but I could be wrong though about that). Ribbon cable failures are fairly common among Whelens, which would make me think that would be the first thing the maintenance crew would check for. If the ribbon cable checked out fine (assuming they checked it), then i'm pretty sure the only other logical reason behind the siren activations would be someone with a scanner. Definitely not far-fetched considering they use DTMF.