Quick Call II Individual & Group Pages

BlueDevil · Dec 4, 2014

I am looking to establish a county wide pager tone for the public safety agencies and officials in our county. Right now each of the 10 agencies in our county has their own set of tones and some of them actually have two sets. All the agencies are using the 2-Tone (A-B or A-B/C-D) format. There is really no consistency between tone selections of these agencies with the exception of one agency with station specific tones. I have access to all the tones sets for all the agencies in the county.

I am wondering if anyone can explain the group tone feature and how it might apply to our goal of creating a county wide pager tone? Would the group tone (8sec tone) be an advantage of any sort or would it be just as easy to create a new 2-tone set to act as the county wide tone and program that tone into everyone's pagers?

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions!

dgruver911 · Dec 5, 2014

brandonmckinney said:
I am looking to establish a county wide pager tone for the public safety agencies and officials in our county. Right now each of the 10 agencies in our county has their own set of tones and some of them actually have two sets. All the agencies are using the 2-Tone (A-B or A-B/C-D) format. There is really no consistency between tone selections of these agencies with the exception of one agency with station specific tones. I have access to all the tones sets for all the agencies in the county.

I am wondering if anyone can explain the group tone feature and how it might apply to our goal of creating a county wide pager tone? Would the group tone (8sec tone) be an advantage of any sort or would it be just as easy to create a new 2-tone set to act as the county wide tone and program that tone into everyone's pagers?

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions!

I did the same thing with our County a few years ago. Years of tradition had no rhyme or reason or consistency to how tones had been issued. But I wanted to way to notify all departments for weather or other announcements with one tone instead of several (at one point our console "all call" sent out nearly 60 seconds of tones) I considered changing tones to a standard arrangement but gave that up as too time and labor intensive. The one advantage I DID have is that all the volunteer fire and ambulance departments had pretty much merged in each city, so each town only needed one tone for both. Like you describe, we had one town with multiple tones, But again, there was no common second tone to take advantage of a group call.

So I just came up with a separate 2 tone that was programmed into all radios and pagers across the county as the All Call. The problem you will run into is this: If they are using radios as pagers, they can only have 2 tones set up in the radio..a single call (AB) or a dual call (AB/CD). Pagers can have several tones (I think 6 or 8, plus a couple of group calls).

sfd119 · Dec 5, 2014

dgruver911 said:
(at one point our console "all call" sent out nearly 60 seconds of tones)

A county near me has almost two minutes of tones, no joke.

RKG · Dec 5, 2014

Don't have time for a treatise, but here's a couple of suggestions.

In addition to Individual and Group calls, be sure to learn about wildcards.

For instance: individual IDs are four digit hexadecimal numbers, in the range of 0001h through DEEEh. 0000 is not permitted; an F is not permitted in any digit; and E is not permitted in the first digit. F serves as a wildcard, while E in the leftmost digit signals a group call.

Let's say you want to create a coordinated ID system for a region in which you have 13 or fewer jurisdictions, each of which has a police agency and a fire agency, and no more than 255 IDs are required for any agency. Set the first digit to indicate the jurisdiction, the second digit to indicate PD or FD, and set the third and fourth digits to indicate the specific officer. E.g., 23E4 is Off. Jones on the PD of jurisdiction 2.

To send a page to all PDs in all jurisdictions, send to F3FF. To send to both PDs and FDs in just jurisdiction 8, send to 8FFF.

This is a process known as digital tiering, and in many applications, it can be more flexible than using group calls.

SteveC0625 · Dec 5, 2014

RKG said:
Don't have time for a treatise, but here's a couple of suggestions.

In addition to Individual and Group calls, be sure to learn about wildcards.

For instance: individual IDs are four digit hexadecimal numbers, in the range of 0001h through DEEEh. 0000 is not permitted; an F is not permitted in any digit; and E is not permitted in the first digit. F serves as a wildcard, while E in the leftmost digit signals a group call.

Let's say you want to create a coordinated ID system for a region in which you have 13 or fewer jurisdictions, each of which has a police agency and a fire agency, and no more than 255 IDs are required for any agency. Set the first digit to indicate the jurisdiction, the second digit to indicate PD or FD, and set the third and fourth digits to indicate the specific officer. E.g., 23E4 is Off. Jones on the PD of jurisdiction 2.

To send a page to all PDs in all jurisdictions, send to F3FF. To send to both PDs and FDs in just jurisdiction 8, send to 8FFF.

This is a process known as digital tiering, and in many applications, it can be more flexible than using group calls.

The OP was inquiring about Quik-Call II tone alerting systems. I've never heard of digital ID's in QC-II. I am familiar with digital ID schemes and MDC1200 ID plans, which is what I think you are referring to here. No?

krokus · Dec 5, 2014

My county has started using a county wide all call, used for severe weather. An abandoned set of tones were re-purposed for this use.

I had my department pagers set up so they trip, but the house bells do not.

Sent via Tapatalk

Voyager · Dec 5, 2014

brandonmckinney said:
I am wondering if anyone can explain the group tone feature and how it might apply to our goal of creating a county wide pager tone? Would the group tone (8sec tone) be an advantage of any sort or would it be just as easy to create a new 2-tone set to act as the county wide tone and program that tone into everyone's pagers?

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions!

Lots of replies, but I didn't really see any explanation.

A Group Tone is an 8 second tone (as you said) that is usually used as a "Long Tone B", so if a department has two tone sets: A-B and C-B, you can program the pagers to use a Group Tone which will be tone B for 8 seconds which will set off both groups at the same time.

It's largely outdated anymore with pagers that are so versitile, but a Minitor I/II would only take 3 reeds which limited the ability to be set off on a large number of 1+1 tone sets (specifically, you could have 2 sets that share a common tone).

With modern pagers, you can use pretty much any tone set if the pager has an open slot in which to program the County-wide tone you want.

Use of 1+1 is better since Group tones tend to false much more often if a computer (think any device anymore) is radiating on the frequency with the correct tone (happens much more often than you would think).

RKG · Dec 13, 2014

SteveC0625 said:
The OP was inquiring about Quik-Call II tone alerting systems. I've never heard of digital ID's in QC-II. I am familiar with digital ID schemes and MDC1200 ID plans, which is what I think you are referring to here. No?

Quite correct. In my neck of the woods, we're converting QC users to MDC (those still on analog) for a host of reasons, and as a result the brain did not quite connect with what the eyes saw. Not the first time.

Quick Call II Individual & Group Pages

BlueDevil

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dgruver911

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sfd119

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RKG

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SteveC0625

Order of the Golden Dino since 1972

krokus

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Voyager

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RKG

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