Fire Station Alerting System

We use a 2-tone paging system to notify personnel of an emergency. We have a receiver/decoder tied into the stations PA system. For many many years we have been using a Federal Signal Station Informer to decode the tone for the station.


This device recently started to fail and we don't have any spares. It was time for quick thinking and rapid deployment of a backup receiver/decoder. This is what I came up with.


Now the question is do we continue to use the portable radio for the nominal opportunity cost of sacrificing a HT750, or play $600 for a new Federal Signal Station Informer. The HT750 is growing on us as it has several features that don't exist in the Station Informer.


Cheers,

Brandon

I would replace it with a device designed for that purpose due to liability reasons. If your jury-rigged system would fail, such as a battery issue, and you missed a call for service there would be a world of hurt come down on your department.

You could use the Veetronix alerting receiver found here: Veetronics 2TR9 emergency alerting receiver prices from Falcon Direct. 1.800.489.2611.
I've used them in the past and they have been reliable. Add the battery back up and remote switching option as needed.

ive seen these in alot of stations here in ny and no one seems to have a problem with them not activating for calls
ComTekk Alert Warning Receiver

W8RMH said:

I would replace it with a device designed for that purpose due to liability reasons. If your jury-rigged system would fail, such as a battery issue, and you missed a call for service there would be a world of hurt come down on your department.

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What he said.

Are you really going to put public safety on some rigged, hacked up portable radio fed into a PA?

Sorry, after cleaning up some schlep rock type non-sense just like this past week, I'm a little put off.

PUBLIC SAFETY radio is not amateur radio. Do it right or don't do it at all.

If your FSA receiver is hosed, at least get a control station together and wire it correctly using the appropriate connectors and interfaces, not wire nuts and some science project look-alike hacked junk.

FWIW, good used CDM750/1250s are less than $200. That and a power supply with a battery revert, connected to a good antenna will make a solid FSA receiver.

Of course, always have it properly checked out on a service monitor and make sure it works to spec before placing it into service.

Sorry to be harsh, but before someone's house burns to the ground or someone dies in an MVC because that station didn't get the alert, it has to be said.

Stop hacking up crap for public safety communications. It also makes a mockery of those of us who are professionals and do this for a living.

MTS2000des said:

What he said.

<snip for brevity!>

Stop hacking up crap for public safety communications. It also makes a mockery of those of us who are professionals and do this for a living.

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+1 all around. Do it right or don't do it at all!

that is a good way to get a lower ISO rating. As someone else posted, a makeshift alerting radio is an invitation to a lawsuit in the event of a missed call. get an alerting receiver that is UL listed for the application.

Thanks for all the comments. We are replacing the Station Informer and never considered not replacing it. Obviously this is a temporary fix as I stated in the OP. I guess I could have left the failing piece of equipment in there so it looked nice. We have to order the replacement equipment so this was the best option during the 2 weeks that it will take to get the replacement device.

I still think it brings up an interesting issue. What are small departments who don't have a lot of funding or financial support suppose to do. Nobody lives in Utopia.


Cheers,

Brandon

brandonmckinney said:

Obviously this is a temporary fix as I stated in the OP.

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A portable radio relies on a battery. A portable radio relies on a portable antenna to receive (at least as shown). Too much can go wrong here. Nevermind the wirenuts and speaker wire, from a power supply/RF receive, this is bad enough as it is. An alert receiver HAS to work EVERY time or it's pointless. Mine as well keep a guy up listening to the radio all shifts because, at the end of the day, from a liability perspective, if equipment fails, this is what one SHOULD do.

brandonmckinney said:

I guess I could have left the failing piece of equipment in there so it looked nice.

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Lock it out/tag out and turn up the volume on a base radio and have someone man it. At least in my state, that is how it's done. Even in small departments that have small staffs and budgets.

brandonmckinney said:

I still think it brings up an interesting issue. What are small departments who don't have a lot of funding or financial support suppose to do. Nobody lives in Utopia.

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Put out requests for donations. You would be surprised at the number of agencies sitting on dozens and dozens of perfectly viable, quality narrowband capable analog control stations, mobiles, portables, repeaters, etc collecting dust as many have migrated to trunked systems.

Or have your department brass ask for the funding. Yes, I know it's work, but having quality, tested, and reliable equipment that works to spec is the only option in public safety.

I am sorry if I came off harsh Brandon, I respect the desire to get it done, but understand that this kind of stuff can lead to disaster. And you don't want that on your shoulders.

If you can't get it fixed right, at least document it and forward it up the chain. That is my advice.

And, there is a fixed audio output on mobile and base radios. And that audio is NOT affected by the volume control. That is a line level, and a line isolation transformer is a good addition for isolation from ground noise.

Do IT RIGHT the first time. I too have seen way too many juryrigged radio setups in the many years.
But that is how you get your ExMo badge.

As it happens I like everyone's response. Forums are meant for open conversation and the sharing of knowledge, experience, and education that others may not have or are trying to learn.

I will provide a little more back story on our scenario to hopefully help clarify things. Our Station Informer started to intermittently and inconsistently fail after some work had been done to our Dispatch CAD system. In other words the Station Informer was not alerting the crew of a dispatch. The exact cause of the failure was unknown but we seemed to finally isolate it to the Station Informer itself. The Station Informer was operating exactly as pictured with a 6" rubber duck portable scanner antenna. What was known is that our radios and pagers were still functioning and alerting without failure, they never did and never have missed a dispatch. As the issue started to drag out over several days some sort of temporary solution needed to be implemented. I decided to take what was working and put it in place of what wasn't working until we could get a replacement.

This is a government operation and because of the cost of the device certain procedures had to be gone through to get approval for its purchase. The item happens to come straight from the factory where there happens to be a delay in shipping. Add all this up and there is over a week worth time that takes to get our replacement Station Informer.

So far the only suggestion I have heard doing in the mean time is to have someone sit next to and monitor the radio. This would work however there is technology available at our disposal that is be used as a reliable backup that does not require someone to stay up all night and monitor the radio. Locking it out/tagging it out doesn't help alert the crew of an incident. Putting out donations for money or surplus equipment or even having administration/brass advocate for the proper funding all takes time and may or may not be successful.

As previously mentioned we are ordering a replacement Station Informer. Is the general consensus that in the mean time we should do nothing and/or man the radio 24/7?

One could take something like a used CM/PM Motorola and set it for two tone decode. Jetstream makes a nice little switching supply with battery backup inputs.

I'd use a Tecnet TM-8000 myself (Kenwood clone).


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We use CDM1250's for station alerting. Very common platform around here.
Base antenna and a power supply. Easy to trigger and external relay and easy to get audio out of.

Never missed a call, and a lot more flexible that a single channel receiver.

mmckenna has it right; a real radio like a CDM1250, set for 2-tone decode; & activate a relay. I've got a design I've used to replace Informers in 28 fire stations. Hasn't missed a lick since they went in.

'Course, we also use outside antennas and not rubber ducks on cheap-*ss receivers.

If I can figure out how to post it here, I will.

I have never had a federal informer fail (not to say they cant). The Informer is a great purpose built unit that will do multiple channels and also can do SAME decode to activate on tornado warnings as well as decode Federal FSK as part of a larger station alerting and automation system using commander software.

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kb4mdz said:

mmckenna has it right; a real radio like a CDM1250, set for 2-tone decode; & activate a relay. I've got a design I've used to replace Informers in 28 fire stations. Hasn't missed a lick since they went in.

'Course, we also use outside antennas and not rubber ducks on cheap-*ss receivers.

If I can figure out how to post it here, I will.

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Posting to follow for your design post

OK, here it is; sorry for the delay.

The opto-coupler used is an Optek OPI1264C; Off the top of my head, the radio side resistor was about 1.2 Kohm, for about 10 mA diode current, and the relay side resistor worked out to about 5 or 6 K? I figured that out because the open circuit voltage of pins 5 & 6 is about 9.6 to 10 VDC, and when the transistor turns on, I want pins 5 & 6 to be as close to 0 VDC as possible; i.e. the transistor is completely saturated on.

Hmm, not working right trying to re-figure this in my head. Grrr, weekend.

Radio is programmed for Auto-reset of the audio, at 30 seconds after the dispatch ends; in other words, if the squelch closes when the paging transmitter turns off, the radio goes quiet 30 seconds later & has to be re-paged.


There are things you can change in this if you want.

Your audio out can come out of Pin 11 of the CDM; that's lower level, but gated like the speaker, but not affected by the volume control knob. If you do that, you may not need the matching transformer TX-1, since Pin 11 to ground is inherently imbalanced, and you can just feed it into say an AUX input.

We've been putting these into a locked cabinet, that way people can't mess with the controls. (as my colleague says "Make it Marine-proof")

You could use the other set of contacts of the time delay relay to trigger something else;a flashing light in the bay, or a buzzer or bell.

The amplifier output is 70V distribution, but we don't daisy chain our speakers; each speaker is a home run back to the amplifier and a distribution strip there for each side of the pair; that way if one speaker goes bad, we can separate it out, or just test each run individually.

You can also adapt this to any other radio that has an accessory connector output change state when it decodes the proper signal; Kenwood, Vertex, etc.

I don't think that an NFPA inspector would find this as an acceptable configuration if he saw it.

UPDATE TO OP: The HT750 ended up working flawlessly. It didn't miss a single call over the couple weeks that we had it in service whereas we were regularly missing calls without any sort of station alerting equipment. We put the HT750 in a base charger and would reset it once or twice a day. We enabled the low battery alert to beep if the battery was getting low at which point someone would reset it in the charger.

We eventually got a new Federal Signal Station Informer ordered and put in service but this took a few weeks since it was right during the holiday season. I still liked the decoding options, features, and alert tone selections over the Station Informer. If I had to do it all over again I would do it the same way. We implemented a temporary solution that worked well until we could get the problem solved.

Hopefully you can sleep easy at night now that you know we are not relying on the subpar equipment produced by Motorola that we just happen to take with us into IDLH environments.

brandonmckinney said:

UPDATE TO OP: The HT750 ended up working flawlessly. It didn't miss a single call over the couple weeks that we had it in service whereas we were regularly missing calls without any sort of station alerting equipment.

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That's called luck. Glad no one knocked it over, or the wire nuts came loose, or the speaker wire short- guess the force was with you.

brandonmckinney said:

We eventually got a new Federal Signal Station Informer ordered and put in service but this took a few weeks since it was right during the holiday season.

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Thank God, Allah, The Sun, whoever one prays to at night.

brandonmckinney said:

We implemented a temporary solution that worked well until we could get the problem solved.

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And as was discussed, there are a dozen more suitable, accepted practice, safer, more reliable, professional, and less risky ways of doing it than some duct taped, ghetto rigged garbage of a portable tied into a PA with speaker wire and wire nuts. But whatever floats your boat.

brandonmckinney said:

Hopefully you can sleep easy at night now that you know we are not relying on the subpar equipment produced by Motorola that we just happen to take with us into IDLH environments.

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The HT-750, if IS-rated, properly PM'ed periodically, is fine for use as a PORTABLE radio, when secured, operated and carried per NFPA/NIST guidelines.

Nowhere in those guidelines, nor any other industry standards, does it specify that it, in combination with Radio Shack speaker wire, and wire nuts, are suitable as a life safety FSA component.

Git er done!