Baltimore City/County Weirdness

[cohenner5377]

Baltimore City and County are doing weird stuff tonight.

Baltimore City Firesounds like they are in the alternate radio room.

Baltimore County Fire has this weird tone at the end of each transmission, at least on TG 4/West.


Can anyone confirm or explain what this is?


David
MD018

 

[Llwellyn]

Is the weird tone only at the end of a transmission, or does it happen during one? If a moto trunk site enters failsoft, the repeater puts a tone out over the air so they know it is in a failure mode. Usually, it's a repeated tone at a set interval, though.

Maybe a dispatch console has a patch set up through a radio with a roger beep? *grin*

EDIT: I turned on the scanner just for grins and I'm not hearing any tones as of about 11:30 - 11:35. There have been several transmissions and I'm not hearing anything unusual from my location.

 

[cohenner5377]

No, the noise is only at the end of a transmission. I wish I could describe the sound, it is kind of weird.

 

[ocguard]

Is it a very fast two-tone sounding noise? Possibly a tone-keying de-key signal. If TG-4 was patched to FIRE-2 (46.28) this sound may be what you're hearing, as FIRE-2 utilizes tone-keying. Also, when dispatch is operating from the old center (under the old court building) you'll hear the same sounds all the time, because those consoles are connected to the system controller via tone-keying. But that center is only ever used for training anymore. The new back-up is in Cockeysville, and utilizes control stations.