Henrico Fire ALL digital?
- Thread starter new2scan
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master_of_none
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- May 16, 2005
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i cant remember what it stands for, but it is how we are alerted to calls. the building has a radio in it thats sole purpose is to monitor this talkgroup. think of it as a modern version of quick call. in that short digital burst, several stations can be alerted at once, rather than sending out a minutes worth of tones.
right, signals on the frap talkgroup, and we have a second 2 way radio for voice traffic. once the station is alerted, the second radio comes through with the dispatch info.
Frap
Does anyone have any specifics on FRAP? Is this an off the shelf system? If so, who manufactures it? We use Motorola Fire Alerting MOSCAD is a similar fashion. SCADA data burst over an analog 800 trunking talkgroup followed by a voice announcement on another voice talkgroup. We are having a lot of failures in this system and haven't been able to pin them down in over 6 months. We may be in the market for something else....
John
Does anyone have any specifics on FRAP? Is this an off the shelf system? If so, who manufactures it? We use Motorola Fire Alerting MOSCAD is a similar fashion. SCADA data burst over an analog 800 trunking talkgroup followed by a voice announcement on another voice talkgroup. We are having a lot of failures in this system and haven't been able to pin them down in over 6 months. We may be in the market for something else....
John
MOSCAD is my specialty, and it works very well when setup to operate as intended, otherwise it wouldn't be so successful in the water/sewer/power/other utility industries. It does not respond well to attempts to modify the behavior it was designed to exhibit, and can be made to be a real pain in the ass by people who aren't well versed in it.
Recently, a system notoriously plagued by alerting failures, was easily resolved by correcting the software issues that had made the system a failure. The system is a large multi-zone mixed full simulcast and non-simulcast, analog and digital setup. The problem, obvious from the beginning to the technicians installing the system, was ignored by the "experts" for months. If you guessed that the alerting was done over a non-simulcast talkgroup, and that the station sites had no software measures to ensure maintained affiliation, you win the prize. Either of those software deficits will make the system unreliable. To say there were several "holes" in the reception of alerting transmissions would be an understatement. It took nothing more than a simple software solution and SCADA radio reprogramming to resolve a situation that had the politicians pointing fingers and pressuring the "experts" to consider a complete replacement of the alerting system. Go figure.
Recently, a system notoriously plagued by alerting failures, was easily resolved by correcting the software issues that had made the system a failure. The system is a large multi-zone mixed full simulcast and non-simulcast, analog and digital setup. The problem, obvious from the beginning to the technicians installing the system, was ignored by the "experts" for months. If you guessed that the alerting was done over a non-simulcast talkgroup, and that the station sites had no software measures to ensure maintained affiliation, you win the prize. Either of those software deficits will make the system unreliable. To say there were several "holes" in the reception of alerting transmissions would be an understatement. It took nothing more than a simple software solution and SCADA radio reprogramming to resolve a situation that had the politicians pointing fingers and pressuring the "experts" to consider a complete replacement of the alerting system. Go figure.
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John, best I can tell we (the county) are using MOSCAD, FRAP is the acronym we use for the alerting part. some people say "they toned us out" or "the tones went off", we just say "we were fraped" or "the frap went off". fire rescue alerting proceedures is what i was told it stood for. sounds right, but i'm guessing the r stands for something else.
wx4cbh said:
We upgraded over 6 months ago to the latest version of MOSCAD and we are averaging 8-15 failures a week. That is a lot more than we used to have. We are broadcasting analog over a 4-site simulcast trunked system. We get Last Command Fail and Radio Communications Fails frequently (too frequently for a public safety application). Now we are getting other strange behaviour like stations activating that weren't commanded to on the FEP. Also getting simultaneous failures of a monitored manual ack button from 2 sequential stations when only one is actually failed.
We have been working with the local Motorola shop and the MOSCAD group at Motorola for some time and have not been able to narrow all this down yet. We have tried several things (yagi antennas for example) with no repeatable results.
If this keeps up, we will probably be in a market for something else. Our FD likes some of the newer systems out there anyway....
John
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