Montgomery County Fire-396T Tone Out

[Hoseman292]

Folks,

I had some issues with getting the fire department "Tone Out" feature to work with Montgomery County. After sending tone pairs over and over with a service monitor and the decoder failing to page, I found the problem was simply in the timing. The default for tone A is 1000 ms or 1 second. The default for tone B is 3000 ms or 3 seconds. Now.. even though there does not appear to be a gap in between tone A and tone B, I found that if I set the value to 1 the decoder would fail to page every time. It was after I changed the value to 100 ms that the radio would page intermittantly. I increased the gap setting to 120 ms and had no problems.

An example of my settings are:

DFRS Duty Tone
Tone A: 569.1 Hz
Duration Tone A: 1000 ms
Tone B: 634.5 Hz
Duration Tone B: 3000 ms
Tone Gap: 120 ms

I hope this helps any of you 396T users that are experiencing problems with this
feature.

Tim

 

[MEBUCKO]

Hoseman 292,
Could you help a lifer from GVFD find the tones for MC? I would appreciate it greatly.
Mark B.
emtbuck@msn.com

 

[troymail]

Folks,

I had some issues with getting the fire department "Tone Out" feature to work with Montgomery County. After sending tone pairs over and over with a service monitor and the decoder failing to page, I found the problem was simply in the timing. The default for tone A is 1000 ms or 1 second. The default for tone B is 3000 ms or 3 seconds. Now.. even though there does not appear to be a gap in between tone A and tone B, I found that if I set the value to 1 the decoder would fail to page every time. It was after I changed the value to 100 ms that the radio would page intermittantly. I increased the gap setting to 120 ms and had no problems.

An example of my settings are:

DFRS Duty Tone
Tone A: 569.1 Hz
Duration Tone A: 1000 ms
Tone B: 634.5 Hz
Duration Tone B: 3000 ms
Tone Gap: 120 ms

I hope this helps any of you 396T users that are experiencing problems with this
feature.

Tim

Wow - it sounds like you're still using the original firmware version for the 396 which required the timing info.... th newer firmware (I think it was the first upgrade release almost 2 years ago) eliminated the timing parms -- you only need enter the tone freqs themselves....

 

[ocguard]

YES- Upgrade your firmware and it will solve all your problems!

 

[heikkaj]

Still having issues

I was lucky enough to find this post doing a Google search. I have programmed a number of MOCO tones into my scanner. It has opened up once or twice for tones, but I am sure it is missing some. I have the county duty tone programmed in there and it has not gone off in 6 hours and I know that the duty tone goes out every time we go to PG so it has to be missing some. It looks like this discussion is at least an few years old now, are the people who posted still around? I updated the firmware just after buying the unit about a year ago so I should I don't think it is a firmware issue. (I have 1.13.17) Plus, I can't figure out where I am supposed to change the timing in there anyway. I am a bit of a novice at this so please forgive me if I am being a bit dense and this is a rookie mistake.
Thanks
James
Heikkaj@aol.com
"Certinly sir, Your a land line"

 

[ka3jjz]

James, it's certainly possible that you found a combination we don't have in the database; here's the spot where we have them defined... (anything in blue or underlined is a link)

http://www.radioreference.com/apps/db/?tab=files&ctid=1203

If you want to check out a bit more information on FTO, or how to do the firmware updates, please see this wiki article...

http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Uniden_DMA_FAQ

The Fire Tone Out article has links to utilities - some are free - that you can use to measure the FTOs and check them against the list we have.

I coded the firmware update article off the top of my head - I may have missed something along the way, but I think it's pretty complete. Firmware version 3.01.00 is now current for the 396

73 Mike

 

[heikkaj]

Thanks

Mike, Thanks, I did the firmware upgrade. I am still having some toneout issues so I will have hook it to my PC and run it through there.
James
"Certinly sir, Your A Land Line"