Missing fire paging tones complaints

We here in Oakland County have many fire departments and most are tone paged out via a console at a dispatch center. We are getting complaints that maybe a certain fire department/s is not getting some of their pages when toned out. We have an instant way of checking but I would like to log the page events from that department/s audio and text if possible.

I see that iFirepager for iPhone/Android is coming out now it would be cool if you could not only save it to your phone but also print out a log sheet showing the tone frequencies and time stamps.

Any ideas on this? It would be nice to have this record for proof sake for the technician under fire.

Thank you in advance.

Note: yes we have determined the pagers base and console and connectivity ends are sound. Also coverage issues have been addressed.

I am using the ARC500Pro software to monitor my receiver and it allows me to log radio trafic, the only thing it does not log is the tone utilized by the channel. Is this something that might be useful to you.

Thank you for the reply, I will look into this

Are these tones on 154.430, or one of the other freqs?

Setting up Two Tone Detect could work. You could use it to just record and store the audio, which will be time stamped by the file creation.

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This would be for many fire departments that our dispatch center handles. We want to some how log the paging frequency, the time and date for two tone tone out verification. The audio is not necessary but can be there.

Proof that the console did send the two tone page over the air.

radiobob1701 said:

This would be for many fire departments that our dispatch center handles. We want to some how log the paging frequency, the time and date for two tone tone out verification. The audio is not necessary but can be there.

Proof that the console did send the two tone page over the air.

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TTD will do that, too. The audio would be recorded, but overwritten on the next tone out. The program is able to launch a batch file, which can do any number of things, including appending a time stamp into a text file.

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Cool thank you for your time, this two tone business of claiming that they didn't get their tones is real touchy, finger pointing can be huge and blame too. We do our best to make sure the equipment is up to specs including all associated equipment including coverage history. But you know how it is in the radio business it's still got a grey line and some like to cross it... I have down loaded the application and will do some serious reading on this.

radiobob1701 said:

Cool thank you for your time, this two tone business of claiming that they didn't get their tones is real touchy, finger pointing can be huge and blame too. We do our best to make sure the equipment is up to specs including all associated equipment including coverage history. But you know how it is in the radio business it's still got a grey line and some like to cross it... I have down loaded the application and will do some serious reading on this.

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My FD had some issues when we switched brands of pager used to trigger our house bells. It seems that the pager tolerances were tighter than the tone encoder's, and some adjustments were made. It is still not perfect, but a lot better.

Hopefully, TTD will help resolve the issue.

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Just in case you have not seen this thread, there is a lot of information here.

http://forums.radioreference.com/showthread.php?t=216758

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Cool thank you again for your time. Yes you are right the pagers are another story.

Let me take a stand here and ask some questions on what may have taken place. Being a radio technical person for over 45 years, I see issues like this all the time in my travels around the country. There are a number of issues that could cause this type of issue.

First, is the systems that is having the problem, using repeaters or remote radio or microwave links to get to the remote transmitters?

Second, has any service work been done on any part of the voice path that may have changed the level settings of the link audio? This entails everything from the paging encoder, the consoles, telephone, microwave or radio remote connection links.

Most people don't understand that the pager tone levels are very important and can't be distorted. This means they need to be kept out of compression. Keeping the tones out of compression means they need to be sent at a lower level than normal voice.

If the pagers are sent out over a radio control station from the dispatch center, it is going to take 2 service techs and 2 service monitors and a TIMS audio level type test meter. Start at the console, go through the control station and then to the repeater to make sure the entire system audio levels are adjusted correctly.

On this topic, I have not run into that many techs in my travels around the country that really know how to adjust the entire system to the correct voice and paging levels. In fact when the narrow banding took place on both VHF and UHF, many techs just went in and did the software changes. They never put a service monitor on any of the radios or even measured the audio levels on any of the phone or microwave circuits. The results are the hit or miss of many of the fire paging radio systems out there today.

I don't intend to provide a step by step guide on how to do the adjustments, as this has been covered in a number of threads already. There has even been a number of people complaining that I am being too hard of the field service technicians. But the fact remains that they are not doing a very good job of maintaining these public safety radios systems.

I keep pointing the finger that the income of many radio shops is falling and there are some that purposely don't do a good job so that they can be called back to make a minor adjustment to just barely make the radio system work. Bill for their time and travel expenses and head back to the shop. Then wait for the next phone call when it fails again. If you seem to keep having this kind of problem, then maybe it's time to find another radio shop for your service work.

Two Tone Paging Verifier

Jim202, is correct about the audio settings.
We use a company called ComTekk SafAlert Notifier. It takes a computer, a receiver to receive the two tone page and their program. The computer is installed at the dispatch center where the fire dept's are dispatched. When the page is sent, the receiver picks up the page from the same repeater or base station as the pager does. The dispatcher is alerted on the screen of the computer that the page went out and was decoded correctly.
If the page goes out correctly, the ComTekk software decodes it, records it. The audio file is either texted or emailed to the fire fighter, if his phone is set up to receive it, and he can replay the message.
This device, helps the department's ISO rating because it verifies that the page has gone out, on the correct channel and has been decoded on the correct tone. We have about 10 of these setup and they work great.
The set-up can cost between $2500.00 or more depending on the computer and receiver and what it takes to receive it at the dispatch center, antenna install, etc.
There is a yearly charge depending on how many text messages are sent out.
Our departments usually have 25 users, which runs about $175.00 per year.
It is well worth the expense.

jim202 said:

Most people don't understand that the pager tone levels are very important and can't be distorted. This means they need to be kept out of compression. Keeping the tones out of compression means they need to be sent at a lower level than normal voice.

If the pagers are sent out over a radio control station from the dispatch center, it is going to take 2 service techs and 2 service monitors and a TIMS audio level type test meter. Start at the console, go through the control station and then to the repeater to make sure the entire system audio levels are adjusted correctly.

On this topic, I have not run into that many techs in my travels around the country that really know how to adjust the entire system to the correct voice and paging levels. In fact when the narrow banding took place on both VHF and UHF, many techs just went in and did the software changes. They never put a service monitor on any of the radios or even measured the audio levels on any of the phone or microwave circuits. The results are the hit or miss of many of the fire paging radio systems out there today.

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Agreed. While the equipment and procedures will have changed from when I used a selective level meter on an analog microwave mux, the concepts have not changed.

We have had issues with audio levels on different talkgroups, from the same dispatch console, and tones have had to be changed, due to distortion attributed to narrowbanding.

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We are a local government radio shop. So we don't bill for the work, they are under our umbrella also to speak about the infrastructure we have the integrity of the associated pieces and parts so to speak in check all the time.

We have gone through all this part and it's not occurring at this time. We just want to for the future have something in place all the time that we can grab this information and utilize it if needed.

It's just another tool in place.

Is your shop address 1200? If so, I overheard someone discussing something about tone issues when I was there the other day. I have shown a tech there my TTD software setup before. If you are the shop I'm thinking of, I could arrange a demo or another visit.

Yes we are, this two tone paging is old technology and it has it's issues at times but you know how it is. We are not experiencing any problems right now but it would be neat to have another tool to look at the issues that come up.