Local Area Emergency Voice Paging

[BigDogg795]

Hey guys,
Trying to brainstorm a solution here and I wanted to get input from the community that knows more than I do. Currently I work in a medical facility that issues FLEX Alphanumeric Pagers to an emergency response team but those pagers have gotten so unreliable we need to consider alternatives. Cell phone service is absolutely terrible and trying to get people to use flip phones in a time where iOS and Android are standards is like trying to ice skate uphill.

One of the solutions I've considered is the use of a standard mobile radio to transmit DTMF tones to voice pagers (Minitor V's and VI's) and broadcast the particulars of the emergency call. The logistics behind implementing aren't terrible, we have spare mobiles, we have authorization on appropriate frequencies; my questions would be, would we need a Zetron or similar to create the tones or is the inbuilt functionality of the mobile (we have XPR4550's) sufficient? We only need to cover about a 3 mile radius and we have the luxury of being the tallest building in the area.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

 

[kf8yk]

The Minitor's only support two-tone paging (AKA Quick Call), so selective signaling with DTMF is not an option.

Are you using the XPR's in analog or digital?

 

[mmckenna]

Shouldn't be a challenge to do this with QC paging. It's just like fire station alerting.
If you have an existing analog radio system on the same band as the pagers, it would be a pretty simple job to program it up.
Set a button on the radio to send the page. Program the pagers for the frequency/tone and you'd be good to go.

 

[BigDogg795]

The Minitor's only support two-tone paging (AKA Quick Call), so selective signaling with DTMF is not an option.

Are you using the XPR's in analog or digital?

That's where I wasn't sure. As far as the XPR's we operate a repeated TRBO system but we have analog available to us as well, in both VHF and UHF flavors lol.

Shouldn't be a challenge to do this with QC paging. It's just like fire station alerting.
If you have an existing analog radio system on the same band as the pagers, it would be a pretty simple job to program it up.
Set a button on the radio to send the page. Program the pagers for the frequency/tone and you'd be good to go.

This! Thank you for putting my idea into words lmao. Basically have a soft key on the mobile to transmit the QC tones, the pagers open up squelch, we transmit the message and call it a day, correct?

 

[clbsquared]

If they all have smart phones, why don’t you use an emergency alerting app like “Active 911” or similar?

 

[mmckenna]

This! Thank you for putting my idea into words lmao. Basically have a soft key on the mobile to transmit the QC tones, the pagers open up squelch, we transmit the message and call it a day, correct?

That's what I'd do.
And you can set up other portables/mobiles to receive the pages.
Somewhere in the pile of stuff I have was the config to do that with Motorola CDM1250's at our fire station. Not sure I could find it, but it's pretty easy to figure out. Chances are, you already have everything you need to make this work.

 

[mmckenna]

If they all have smart phones, why don’t you use an emergency alerting app like “Active 911” or similar?

Cell phone service is absolutely terrible and trying to get people to use flip phones in a time where iOS and Android are standards is like trying to ice skate uphill

If you could get the users to utilize the hospital WiFi, you may get this to work. But getting people to set their smart phones up to do things that they consider "work related" might be hard, and sometimes unions have a bad case of heartburn over stuff like this.

 

[Tech21]

If you could get the users to utilize the hospital WiFi, you may get this to work. But getting people to set their smart phones up to do things that they consider "work related" might be hard, and sometimes unions have a bad case of heartburn over stuff like this.

Work stuff on work phone, personal stuff on personal phone. If your job duties require you to have a communication device. Your job is responsible for providing that device.

 

[mmckenna]

Work stuff on work phone, personal stuff on personal phone. If your job duties require you to have a communication device. Your job is responsible for providing that device.

Yep, I haven't paid for my own cell phone or cell phone service in about 20 years.