Aurora FD Individual Station Alerts

[county]

All-

Over the last several days during waking, non-working hours, I've been identifying the unique, station specific i-calls that pop-up on the Aurora TRS whenever an AFD call goes out. I don't see this logged anywhere else, so hopefully this will be of some benefit to some folks. It's a 2-tone alert, no voice, not sure if this is Zetron, or just a unique 2-tone combination that opens the station speakers. These i-calls are station, not rig specific. So for example a truck 7 run & an engine 7 run get the same i-call. The i-call goes out between the two-tone alert & the vocalization of the call on the AFD Dispatch talkgroup (DEC 529).

Sometimes I'm just interested in activity of 1 particular station (the one in my part of town), & quite frankly, a lot of times I just get irritated by all of the chatter & don't want to monitor the whole city! So, in these cases I'll just monitor my station's i-call for activity, & then activate my "dispatch" group in my BCD-396T to catch the call on the voice talkgroup. Just like a regular talkgroup, an i-call can be stored & scanned in most EDACS capable trunk trackers..

So again, this has only been a casual pursuit, & I don't have stations 13-15 yet (not near as busy as the rest of the city) but when I do, I'll post it. And I've confirmed each of these at least twice, so the i-calls appear to be consistently the same IDs.. but no warranty expressed or implied, use at your own risk ;-)

STATION 1: i15938
STATION 2: i15939
STATION 3: i15944
STATION 4: i15945
STATION 5: i15946
STATION 6: i15947
STATION 7: i15949
STATION 8: i15952
STATION 9: i15955
STATION 10: i15956
STATION 11: i15958
STATION 12: i15960
STATIONS 13-15: COMING SOON!

 

[jimmnn]

Very complete list Mike, thanks a bunch for compiling it and more importantly for sharing.

Jim<

 

[county]

Thanks James, glad to contribute! I know I've gleaned a lot from the knowledge in this forum from searches & posting questions, so this rare time I actually discovered something I could pass on!

Thanks to some AFD activity today, I was able to complete my list, which now includes the alerts for stations 13-15.

AURORA FD STATION ALERTS (i-calls)

STATION 1: i15938
STATION 2: i15939
STATION 3: i15944
STATION 4: i15945
STATION 5: i15946
STATION 6: i15947
STATION 7: i15949
STATION 8: i15952
STATION 9: i15955
STATION 10: i15956
STATION 11: i15958
STATION 12: i15960
STATION 13: i15961
STATION 14: i15964
STATION 15: i15981

 

[greenthumb]

Great work! I have added the listing to the Aurora EDACS system page.

 

[county]

Unfortunately within the last week or 2 (can't nail down exactly when since I've been out-of-town) Aurora Fire has stopped using the pre-alert i-calls to the individual station radios :-(

It doesn't look they are even using the TRS at all for station-specific information anymore (aside from the general dispatch of-course, on the primary channel). I've been monitoring in search mode with my 396XT just in case they changed the i-call assignments, and the system is quiet up until the dispatch warble.

Is anyone aware of an alternate station-specific alert method being used by AFD?

Thanks!

Mike

 

[N0GTG]

Aurora has again begun using a Zetron alerting system. This is the system which was used prior to the switch to EDACS. In the past it was connected by dedicated landline to each station, and I suspect that may be the case again. I'll have to do some more checking to find out the technical details.

 

[county]

Interesting, thanks for the help Curt.

I have noticed as of this a.m. however, the individual station i-calls are again active. I'm not sure what's up, but I admit I'm hopeful they continue to use the i-calls

 

[speard]

Aurora has again begun using a Zetron alerting system. This is the system which was used prior to the switch to EDACS. In the past it was connected by dedicated landline to each station, and I suspect that may be the case again. I'll have to do some more checking to find out the technical details.

It's interesting that with "new" technology, the old technology comes back into use.

 

[N0GTG]

Part of the reason for the 'regression' to Zetron was that the previous CAD (Computer Assisted Dispatching) interfaced with the Zetron, and automatically toned the selected stations. The I-call operation was always done manually. At the beginning, there was lots of talk about having the new CAD do this with the I-calls, but after lots of 'discussion' about who said what, it ended up that MA/COM wanted something like $10k to actually make it happen, and it may or may not work as intended, so the idea was dropped. The Zetron always worked well for us, and I think they may be having to tweak things to interface it with the current CAD. One thing that was good about the landline Zetron was that it polled the stations at about 30-second intervals to verify that the phone line and station box were working properly; and you could make off-air announcements to all stations, selected stations, or an individual station. I always thought that it was extremely reliable, which is sometimes rare in today's world.

 

[abqscan]

Unfortunately within the last week or 2 (can't nail down exactly when since I've been out-of-town) Aurora Fire has stopped using the pre-alert i-calls to the individual station radios :-(

I've been monitoring the AURORA EDACS system via etrunk for over a month and I haven't seen them use the station-specific alerting @ all....

on another note.... 252 Talkgroups logged...

 

[n0doz]

>on another note.... 252 Talkgroups logged...<

I only have 143...