Fire Toneout

[jturner0829]

I understand how the fire tone out feature works with a analog system. does it work with a digital system.
I am a volunteer firefighter and my department is on a simulcast p25 system and we don't have pagers or radios. I sometimes will sleep with my pro106 on at night so I know if fires happen. I also have a BCD996XT mounted in my truck. my question, is there a way that the scanner only picks up after a tone out and until you reset. I would like a way to only listen when calls are dispatched and have an option not to hear all the other traffic. 95% of our calls are medical non-fire related calls and sometimes the wife gets aggravated at night with all the radio traffic. I would like to hear the call being dispatched and have an option to continue listening if its a fire related or reset or silence if a medical call and still hear the next call get dispatched out later on. I hope this makes sense. I also just ordered a BCD536HP today. I wanted to replace my pro106 which seems to not put out the audio as well anymore.

 

[krokus]

No one has figured out an effective way to tone out on p25.

If you can convince your agency to "tone" only fire calls with a certain talkgroup, then you cold monitor just that talkgroup.

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[Voyager]

If they use the built-in paging that exists on P25 systems, the scanner could, in theory, decode that data looking for a code for a single department. But, I doubt Uniden would add that. How does your department notify members of calls if you don't have any pagers or radios? Siren only?

 

[ofd8001]

That's kind of interesting. Far and away the most typical ways I've seen of alerting volunteer firefighters is through tone and voice paging. The Insurance Services Office, the folks who assign fire departments their ratings, really like to see volunteer firefighters issued pagers to be notified of calls.

My community has used this type of system, even long before I got in the fire service in the 1970s. We have since migrated to a simulcast P25 system for unit to unit communications, but tone and voice is still the primary notification means.

We have the VHF dispatch frequency hard patched to a dispatch talkgroup on the new system. That way we hear the calls on both pagers and over the simulcast system.

For your situation, is it a trunked P25 simulcast system or is it a conventional P25 simulcast system? If it's conventional, you probably could do something with Fire Tone Out, but not if it's trunked.

Presuming this is Heard County Georgia, I'm seeing a VHF frequency in the database for fire dispatch - 154.400. There is a note that it has to be narrow banded, and perhaps they took it out of service, though the license is valid until 2021. Thus it could still be used, with perhaps a different transmitter, for paging.

 

[Jay911]

Two-tone paging doesn't function well on a digital audio path. The deviation (the difference in tone between what is "heard" and what it "expects to hear") is too variable with audio compression.

Fire Tone-Out is Uniden's name for two-tone paging. Any kind of alerting that is done with some other method than two audible tones at the beginning of a transmission is not going to work with FTO. I'm relatively certain that FTO will only monitor in analog mode - it won't switch to P25 mode while in FTO status.

If you are alerted by dispatch using the built-in Call Alert or Page feature of the trunking system, that's definitely not monitorable with FTO. You might be able to set up an alert light/tone on the radio ID that's call-alerted; for example, if radio ID 12345 is what dispatch call alerts on, you might try either having radio ID 12345 marked with an alert, or put in i12345 (i.e. an I-Call ID) as a talkgroup, and put an alert on that. I can't guarantee that's going to work, though.

If your digital system does have two audio tones to start off your callouts, they're either being used just as noisemakers to catch your attention, or there is most likely an analog frequency somewhere that is patched in to send out those tones. You would be wise to use that analog channel as your FTO channel.

 

[owenbricker]

fire tone out

If this is heard co. Georgia, the broadcastify live audio feed for heard co. fire is 154,400, and I did hear a call get toned out, and call letters given after tone out was WZX774 which is herd co. So it appears 154.400 is paging, and operations is on WARRS P25 system.

 

[jturner0829]

If they use the built-in paging that exists on P25 systems, the scanner could, in theory, decode that data looking for a code for a single department. But, I doubt Uniden would add that. How does your department notify members of calls if you don't have any pagers or radios? Siren only?

They would issue out the analog radios to volunteer personell in the past. a couple years ago they collected all the radios that the volunteers had for rebanding. well there was issues with the radios and most needed some sort of repair. well they didnt get issued back out due to cost. at that time they decided to see what other options are out there. it would be very expensive for them to issue out $2500 p25 digital radios out to the volunteers. currently they are back on the hunt for something for us.

we are a paid department but also have volunteers. so there main focus is the paid guys. right now some of us use scanners then we send out a text to other volunteers if there is a fire related call. but thats not 100% effective because sometimes we forget to text out.

 

[jturner0829]

That's kind of interesting. Far and away the most typical ways I've seen of alerting volunteer firefighters is through tone and voice paging. The Insurance Services Office, the folks who assign fire departments their ratings, really like to see volunteer firefighters issued pagers to be notified of calls.

My community has used this type of system, even long before I got in the fire service in the 1970s. We have since migrated to a simulcast P25 system for unit to unit communications, but tone and voice is still the primary notification means.



We have the VHF dispatch frequency hard patched to a dispatch talkgroup on the new system. That way we hear the calls on both pagers and over the simulcast system.

For your situation, is it a trunked P25 simulcast system or is it a conventional P25 simulcast system? If it's conventional, you probably could do something with Fire Tone Out, but not if it's trunked.

Presuming this is Heard County Georgia, I'm seeing a VHF frequency in the database for fire dispatch - 154.400. There is a note that it has to be narrow banded, and perhaps they took it out of service, though the license is valid until 2021. Thus it could still be used, with perhaps a different transmitter, for paging.

our system is trunked p25. WARRS is the system. its a multi-county system. yes it is for Heard county.
our old VHF is still active although my scanners do not pick it up well enough to understand dispatch. mostly static.

 

[jturner0829]

If this is heard co. Georgia, the broadcastify live audio feed for heard co. fire is 154,400, and I did hear a call get toned out, and call letters given after tone out was WZX774 which is herd co. So it appears 154.400 is paging, and operations is on WARRS P25 system.

yes you are correct. they set that up a couple weeks ago to see how it would work for us. i cant hear anything but static after the tones though. i really have a hard time understanding any info dispatch gives out for the call.

also our fire and ems calls share the same talkgroup.

i could set up the analog for FTO and when i hear it the switch it over to the digital tg.

 

[ofd8001]

Have you looked into I am Responding and eDispatch?

IamResponding.com - Know Immediately who is responding to your dispatch as soon as the pagers go off!
eDispatches » Don't ever miss a call | eDispatches

The fire department I retired from is using I Am Responding. There was a little bit of initial set-up involved and you have to work with your dispatch center to get this going. And, unfortunately there is a cost involved for these services.

It works pretty good 99.5% of the time. Every now and then I'll get an alert on my iPhone before it goes out on the radio (retired, but still in the blood). The only issues I've seen are when there is a hitch with the e-mail stuff at our dispatch center (a rare occurrence).

I'm surprised that your chief officers haven't insisted on some type of system so they don't have to listen to a radio for calls happening outside of their "regular" hours.

In addition to the obvious reason for getting the most volunteers to respond to fire calls, there is an additional benefit. Going back to that ISO thing I mentioned earlier. When ISO comes to visit, they'll look at the number of on-duty and off-duty/volunteers responding to fire calls. Every three off-duty/volunteer firefighters counts as one full time person on shift, so that increases points for staffing.

 

[Jay911]

My department has also used IaR for several years. OFD, I'm not sure if you're still using it or, if not, if this was available when you were using it, but IaR has apps for iOS and Android phones now too, so I don't even have to dial the 800 number any more.

I just spent a week in Florida (I live in western Canada) and I got all the alerts in realtime. I can base how "close" they are to the actual dispatch because I use TwoToneDetect (available elsewhere on RR) to capture our voice pages and email them out to members as well, so I get the TTD pages about 60 seconds after the IaR alerts. I also have our department on Broadcastify (I'm our communications officer so it's easy to get all this done ) - the same scanner and computer in our firehall's attic does the Broadcastify feed and TTD alerting. So no matter where I am, I can receive the alert from IaR, get the initial page from the TTD email, and if necessary follow the call on Broadcastify.

 

[ofd8001]

Jay-

Most of the folks on our department are using the app for their smart phones. The app had just came out as I was retiring. The app notification is much quicker than getting emails or text alerts.

Our fire department hasn't emphasized the "letting us know you are coming" component of the app. However a number of neighboring fire departments do, even to the point of having big monitors at the fire station to know who should be coming. I'm thinking most all of the fire departments in my area are using I Am Responding as it is so effective.

Prior to the I Am Responding, we used the Two Tone Detect. It had its value and certainly was better than nothing. Plus there isn't a recurring cost. Its downside was keeping the address book current and there could be some time between dispatch time and message receipt time.

 

[Jay911]

Maintaining the TTD address book is a little tricky, and indeed there can be a delay (as there technically can be with IaR as well). How I got around the address book issue was to put all the membership in a Google Group (like a Yahoo Group but, well, with Google). I gave them specific instructions to keep their info up-to-date in that group - everyone has read access but nobody but the address that TTD sends from can post. That also results in Google maintaining a database of all my "posts" (pages) if I want to go back and review any.

 

[jturner0829]

Have you looked into I am Responding and eDispatch?

IamResponding.com - Know Immediately who is responding to your dispatch as soon as the pagers go off!
eDispatches » Don't ever miss a call | eDispatches

The fire department I retired from is using I Am Responding. There was a little bit of initial set-up involved and you have to work with your dispatch center to get this going. And, unfortunately there is a cost involved for these services.

It works pretty good 99.5% of the time. Every now and then I'll get an alert on my iPhone before it goes out on the radio (retired, but still in the blood). The only issues I've seen are when there is a hitch with the e-mail stuff at our dispatch center (a rare occurrence).

I'm surprised that your chief officers haven't insisted on some type of system so they don't have to listen to a radio for calls happening outside of their "regular" hours.

In addition to the obvious reason for getting the most volunteers to respond to fire calls, there is an additional benefit. Going back to that ISO thing I mentioned earlier. When ISO comes to visit, they'll look at the number of on-duty and off-duty/volunteers responding to fire calls. Every three off-duty/volunteer firefighters counts as one full time person on shift, so that increases points for staffing.

Edispatch is what they have been checking into using our old VHF system. That is what the broadcastify feed is from. they have not rolled this out to us yet. im not sure what other options they may have looked into.

i feel it is very important for us to be notified in a timely mannor so we can get there asap. even though we have full time paid personell we are a small department. you may only have a hand full of personell on the fire grounds. so our extra man power is a must have for many reasons. safety for the crew number 1.