Creating Tones using Audacity

I found an very useful feature on Audacity 1.3.4 Beta (im not sure if this works on the older versions). If you click the "generate" button on the top toolbar, then click "tones", you can create the tones your fire department uses. Alot of the FD's here have their tones sumbitted in the codes and maps section of the database, and you can just enter it into the "frequency (HZ)" box and it will come out as the tone. The only problem i've had with it is timeing. It's hard to figure out which part of the tone goes for how long, i made it sound perfect for my tones by making it 1 second on tone A, and 3 seconds on tone B, but that will be trial and error.
You can download Audacity 1.3.4 here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

Happy Scanning, SJC

If you record a set of tones from your local system, load that into Audacity and use it to measure precisely how long the actual tone are. Just highlight the beginning of the first tone and then mark that as the start point, find the end of it and mark that as the end. Audacity should readily tell you the length in seconds (down to the thousandths probably) of that portion on the status bar across the bottom, then just do the same for the second part.

Hope this helps...

Is there a way to decode the tones using that program?

nah, it just generates the tones ... i.e. you tell it so and so Hz for so and so seconds ...

http://www.polar-electric.com/DTMF/Index.html

There's a Windows based DTMF decoder there - and an encoder also, works fine from what I just attempted and was accurate.