Howdy, Playing Around With My G5 & SDS100 and Want To Add A Bank For MD FIRSTS Allagany, Garrett & Washington Counties Fire & EMS. I Get Down That Way Couple Times a Year But Don't Live To Far Away In Westmoreland County, PA. And Wondering If I Can Catch Some Signals in Southern Somerset/Fayette County. What Towers Should I Put In And What's The Difference Between Fire Main & Fire EMS Dispatch On Allagany ? What Are The Most Used Fire Talkgroups For Allagany & Garrett. Thanks Have A Great Day.
Allagany County
- Thread starter EMTBob
- Start date
- Status
If I understand you correctly, you want to add sites to receive Fire & EMS for Washington, Allegany, and Garrett Counties. The FIRST system has simulcast and standalone sites that provide service for the three counties, so you will need to add these sites to your programming:
Washington Simulcast
Allegany Simulcast
Allegany Garrett Simulcast
Garrett Simulcast
Lambs Knoll ASR
Quirauk Mtn ASR
Knoxville ASR
Sideling Hill ASR
The FIRST system carries Fire and EMS talkgroups for Allegany County. Garrett County operates its own Fire and EMS radio system and will eventually transition to FIRST over the next year. The county has TGs assigned on FIRST, but most of the field units do not have FIRST radios at this time. Washington County uses its own TRS. All the info you need is in the RRDB database.
Washington Simulcast
Allegany Simulcast
Allegany Garrett Simulcast
Garrett Simulcast
Lambs Knoll ASR
Quirauk Mtn ASR
Knoxville ASR
Sideling Hill ASR
The FIRST system carries Fire and EMS talkgroups for Allegany County. Garrett County operates its own Fire and EMS radio system and will eventually transition to FIRST over the next year. The county has TGs assigned on FIRST, but most of the field units do not have FIRST radios at this time. Washington County uses its own TRS. All the info you need is in the RRDB database.
Last edited:
In Southern Somerset County, you can try the Allegany-Garrett simulcast site. The closest sites to you would be Big Savage, Dan's Rock and Mt Savage. Almost all Allegany traffic is heard on both the Allegany-Garrett and Allegany simulcast sites due to the number of radios that are on 24/7 and how both simulcast sites cover Cumberland.
The difference between the two simulcast sites are, the Allegany-Garrett site covers the Western half of the county, and the Allegany Simulcast site covers Cumberland and the Eastern half of the county.
The Garrett simulcast cell has sites at Keyser's Ridge, Blooming Rose Rd and Grantsville. Those sites should reach up into Somerset a bit.
Fire/EMS Dispatch is for alerting/paging only. It is patched to their low band 33.78 legacy channel for the time being. The county is building a UHF analog simulcast paging channel to replace low band.
Fire/EMS main is the talkgroup departments would answer up on when getting a call, then they switch over to a operations channel such a Alpha 6-1 or something like that which is assigned by the dispatcher.
The site list Maus gave you is accurate for hearing activity in Western Maryland. You should also add Warrior Mt to the list of sites. It's a stand alone ASR, but fills in a large area for the Flintstone/Oldtown area. It will help when on I 68 between the Martin's Mt and Town Hill simulcast sites.
Forgot Warrior Mtn, although it doesn't carry a lot of traffic (at least last time I was up that way) - and it does lose power from time to time
Definitely add the site to your programming if you are traveling in the region. That said, if you are only trying to monitor from your home (a fixed site,) you really only need to program the nearest FIRST site.Thanks Much Appreciated. I know with The RR Database My SDS 100 Will Be Ok Just Redoing My G5 And Have Some Extra Space And Figured Some FIRSTS Into it. How Is Cumberland Fire Activated Do they still use the UHF Dispatch Freq. Thanks Again once I get Time And Program Up Will Take A Road Trip. Also Is There a Common Fore Talkgroup That They Assign Or Do They use them all ? Have a good Day.
Cumberland FD is alerted on TG 11836 which is labeled "Event 1/CFD". They may still multicast alerts on their UHF LTR system as well, but I can not confirm that. Most of CFD operations happens on TAC 10-1, 10-2 or 10-3. These talk groups don't make it to the Allegany-Garrett Simulcast much unless there's a subscriber on the west side of the county affiliated to them.
tvengr
Well Known Member
Washington Co uses a UHF P25 system. You may or may not get it on your G5 depending on if you have the UHF or VHF model.
Don't They Have A TG On FIRSTS For Fire Dispatch ? I Thought I Saw That In The Database. Thanks
tvengr
Well Known Member
If all you want for Washington Co is Fire/EMS Dispatch, that is TGID 13595 on the Maryland FIRST system.
Forgot Warrior Mtn, although it doesn't carry a lot of traffic (at least last time I was up that way) - and it does lose power from time to time
So you think they don't have emergency power at Warrior?
They do, and it was an issue so they installed a new UPS system with longer runtime. That particular site is extremely remote (probably the most inaccessible site in the system) and suffers comparatively frequent commercial power interruption.
Not as often as you would think but there is a Generator on site as well, not just a UPS, my agency has one even further up the mountain and we have some issues with accessibility in the winter however this one is not as far up as ours, by no means is this the worst site for accessibility!
I came across this article today in the online edition of Fire Rescue One magazine, talking about the utility of FirstNet in Allegany County. Interestingly, the county's CAD system proved to be a bottleneck - not sure of their vendor.
www.firerescue1.com
Success Story: Rural Maryland department gets FirstNet connected
Within an hour of deploying FirstNet-Ready devices, the department was putting newfound connectivity to work on a mutual-aid call
www.firerescue1.com
I didn't edit it, lol! Worse, the author was apparently a EM director in Mineral Springs, so he says in the article. (And the thread title spell Allegany wrong...)
Allegany and Cumberland are both off the LTR system. Alerting is done on 460.55 and simulcasted on the FIRST system.
- Status
