Fire Tone Out HELP!!!!!!!

[judas12]

Can Someone explain to me what a fire tone out is please? i cant figure it out. Also, is it possible to listen to only one fire station? like Cerritos or Norwalk (L.A. County Fire) or do i just have to be monitoring Blue 8 Dispacth and Blue 1 South all the time.

Thanks

[RobVallejo]

A fire tone out is a series of audible tones broadcast over a dispatch frequency which alert specific resources that they have an assignment. These tones can activate fire station alarms, pagers, crew bus signal bells, and other devices which all serve to get the attention of the appropriate personnel. The term tone out can also refer to the portion of a dispatch broadcast which includes these tones.

Many radios include a monitoring feature which helps to prevent having to listen to the constant stream of traffic on many dispatch frequencies. When this feature is engaged, none of the radio transmissions are audible until after a specific set of tones are broadcast. In this way, firefighters in relatively slow stations can sleep during the night without having to listen to the radio. The radio is muted until they are dispatched. Then, the tones for their station or apparatus are broadcast and activates their radio, pagers, station alarm, etc.

There are many different types of tone outs. Some are several seconds long and have two tones. Some are less than a second have 4 or 5 tones and sound like pressing speed dial on a touch tone phone.

If you have a scanner or radio with the monitoring feature, you can probably mute out all the routine radio traffic. To do this, you would need to program in the tones for the station or apparatus which you are interested in. That way, your radio only turns on when that station or apparatus is being toned out.

Things to note: sometimes the tones are assigned to a station, not an apparatus. If the people or equipment you are interested in are bumped up to another station for a cover assignment, they would be toned out with that new station's tones. Conversely, if you are only interested in a particular station, and the tones are assigned to different apparatuses, then would have to reprogram your radio whenever a cover crew was in the station.

The agency I previously worked for had a dispatch system which would automatically sound a group quick call tone, activating every station in the county, whenever more than 3 stations were selected to respond. Thus our station's alarm was often activated even when we had no assignment.

I hope this has been helpful. Good luck.

[APTN]

Here is an example clip.

YouTube - Bad ass Fire Dispatch

The alert tones, followed by the nature of the call can be heard.

[Eng74]

Originally Posted by judas12

Can Someone explain to me what a fire tone out is please? i cant figure it out. Also, is it possible to listen to only one fire station? like Cerritos or Norwalk (L.A. County Fire) or do i just have to be monitoring Blue 8 Dispacth and Blue 1 South all the time.

Thanks

LACoFD stations do not use a 1+1 tone-out for their station's main alerting system. They have one that is a back-up that gets tested every saturday morning I think. The tone-outs you do hear on Blue 8 are the BC's and some others. Are you tring to use a Uniden radio with tone out? If you do set it up the best thing to do is to set the delay time to Infinite that way you know when it has been toned out. If you do want it for just one station that is the only one you load. The one down side to the tone-out system is that when you use it you are locked on that channel and only hear the radio traffic when it gets toned out. So it is really just muteing the radio.