SDS100/SDS200: Sds100 fire tone out

[ofd8001]

Can you run fire tone out in the background while you scanner scans "zones/banks/systems?"

No the scanner can be either Fire Tone Out or "regular" scanning. The thinking is when you use FTO, you do not want to be disturbed by general scanning - only when the desired tones go off on a specified channel.

When you get down to it, that makes sense - if you want to be sure you "catch" a fire dispatch, just set that channel to be a Priority Channel, set an alert tone for the channel, turn the Priority Scan on, and go from there. You'll be scanning, but checking back for dispatches.

 

[N9JIG]

Thanks again for the reply. I am still playing around with the optimum settings for this. Right now I am running the squelch at full (15) since the transmitter is not very far from me. Hopefully, that will reduce falsing. If not, I may even try the attenuator!

Also, how well does the Uniden SDS100 multiple, sequential tones? While I suppose it isn't super common, some communications centers near me will have a Monday night test or a Friday night test in which they send out multiple tones in a row. Another example would be certain severe weather events in which several organizations are paged in a row. I assume that the radio and logging software will deal with these just fine, but I am looking to others here for their experience.

Unless the carrier drops between tones and you have the delay set to 0 you would only log the first tone set.

Actually, maybe the time when they do pager testing would be a great time to log multiple tones at once. I am sure the problem I will face at some point is I will have tones for some of the busier departments, but come up short on the ones that get toned out only once a month or so.

This is when recording the tones and washing the .wav file thru Audition or Audacity works so well.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, this might be an excellent example of why I need to add a patch cord between my SDS100 and computer. That way I can record the actual audio being sent after the tones are transmitted.

Exactly. Before the XT series added Tone Search I used to use Adobe Audition and ScanRec. I would record the local fire channel for a period and run the recordings thru Adobe Audition and decipher the tones. This way I could also listen to the voice and determine from use what the tone purpose was.

One day a local dispatch center must have installed new equipment as they ran thru a couple dozen tone sets and after each one announced the purpose of that tone set. ("Testing Chief 400's tones"...) Tones one rarely hears were recorded and when I played the recording back it was like winning the scanner lottery.

 

[N9JIG]

No the scanner can be either Fire Tone Out or "regular" scanning. The thinking is when you use FTO, you do not want to be disturbed by general scanning - only when the desired tones go off on a specified channel.

When you get down to it, that makes sense - if you want to be sure you "catch" a fire dispatch, just set that channel to be a Priority Channel, set an alert tone for the channel, turn the Priority Scan on, and go from there. You'll be scanning, but checking back for dispatches.

To add to this this is why I like the BCT15X so much. It is perfect for doing Fire Tone Out as it is relatively inexpensive (~$180 new) and perfect to use as a Fire Tone Out receiver. I actually used one as a temporary alert receiver for the fire house after a lightning strike took out the PA system, got them back up in 5 minutes after I arrived.

 

[JASII]

One of the departments displays the Tone A as 2071.5 Hz when they are paged out. I never see this on the standard charts. Is this a non-standard tone or have they added some tones that might not be on all of the legacy charts?

 

[N9JIG]

The actual tone could be 2073.0. That is a standard Plectron tone code. Remember that tone detection on scanners is not a precise thing, being off a couple Hz. either way is normal. The discrepancy gets wider at the higher tones as well.

 

[ofd8001]

If a guy was to Google Midian Electronics Tone Chart, there would be a link to a PDF file showing the various tones. As N9JIG mentioned, 2073 is a Plectron tone.

Having that tone chart handy is helpful when doing a tone search.

 

[JASII]

The actual tone could be 2073.0. That is a standard Plectron tone code. Remember that tone detection on scanners is not a precise thing, being off a couple Hz. either way is normal. The discrepancy gets wider at the higher tones as well.

Thank you, to both of you for the replies. That makes sense. I did not realize that the discrepancy is wider at the higher tones. The history log show these at about 20 minutes apart. I was not present when the pages went out. I had checked some chart, but I didn't find anything close to 2071.5 or 2076.3, but knowing that there is a 2073.0 would be about in the middle of these two Tone A's.



Tone-Out 154.785 2076.3 1152.2

Tone-Out 154.785 2071.5 1152.5

My assumption is that the actual tone set might be: Tone A: 2073.0 Hz Tone B: 1153.4 Hz

Another thing that I was wondering about, however, is the Tone A is a Plectron and the Tone B is a Motorola Quik Call II. Does that even matter any more?

 

[doctordialtone]

Does that even matter any more?

No. A tone is a tone.

 

[N9JIG]

On older consoles they had limited sets of tones, usually a group or two of tones sets, usually around a dozen tones per group.

Newer consoles are pretty much totally programmable for any tone in small increments usually .1 Hz.

 

[JASII]

I am now at the point of wanting to try audio recording on/from the SDS100. From those here who do, or have done this, do you prefer recording internally to the SDS100 or using ProScan or other software to record?

Right now I have my SDS100 in the Tone-Out Search mode with the REC indicator displaying. I am assuming that it will only record audio from the scanner when there is activity. What is the recommended delay setting in this mode?

There was just a fire page and the ProScan logged it and I am assuming the SDS100 recorded it, but I haven't tried to listen to it yet. Does the delay refer specifically to how long the squelch stays open after the tones drop? If there are two or more sets of tones transmitted, does the delay affect the SDS100 from capturing multiple sets of tones?

 

[RJS]

Good idea, not sure on Proscan recording and may be limited however to 30 seconds to infinity with current settings for FTO.

Maybe Uniden can update to a 5 minute or 10 minute (or both) time out to record initial traffic after the tone-out and arrival conditions.

 

[JASII]

What is the typical setup for most fire departments with regards to tone out frequencies?

Do most have an All Call and then a pair for each station, if they have multiple stations?

Do many/most have different pairs for fire vs. medical?

Do most have specific pairs for chief fire officers?

Do most have a common A tone or B tone?

What is the significance of this?

Will a Long Tone B open up all of the pagers for that department or have pagers advanced so much that the concept of common tones doesn't matter any more?

Is timing as importance as it once was?

 

[N9JIG]

A single long tone was/is very commonly used to alert multiple stations or agencies with a single tone, that is exactly what it was designed for. Many small agencies would have a Station Tone for each station and special tone sets for chiefs, inspectors etc. and General (multiple stations) or Callbacks would often use single long tones ("Long Tone B"). Since most early encoders only had specific tones in "Groups" of 10 or so tones it was common for each station to have the same A or B tone, the other tone would be specific to the station or purpose, then the Long A or B would alert all stations or personnel ("General" or "Callback").

The department I was on in suburban Chicago in the 70's and 80's had 2 stations but was dispatched by a larger neighbor with 4 stations. Using QC-2, each station had a "Station" tone set, our town used tones in a Group of 1-2 for Station 5 and 2-1 for Station 6, 2-2 (Long B) was the General Call Back. 3-2 was the Inspectors and 4-2 was the Chiefs. This allowed us to just quickly reverse the reeds in the old Minitor's if we were assigned to the other station. The other town used another group and a similar setup with a different QC-II group. The dispatch agency also had Plectron codes in a separate encoder to set off the regional mutual aid system (called MABAS) codes.

The QC-II tones were encoded from an encoder box with a column of two buttons and about 8 rows (IIRC) so to set off Station 5 you pressed the Tone 1 in Column 1 and Tone 2 in Column 2. The Plectron Box had about a half dozen buttons in a single row that were preset with the tones, but they only used 2 tone sets.

Later on we had a Zetron Model 25 at my new agency that was programmable within specific tone groups as well as a limited number of custom tone sets. This also allowed DTMF signalling as well. I think one had to purchase ROMS for each group or mode. With this system we had tone sets for all of our neighboring agencies and used a combination of DTMF, QC-2 and Plectron codes from a single encoder. Each station had an individual station tone set and there were a couple specialty tones for each agency, such as inspectors, chiefs and callbacks. This was pretty common thru out the area, most suburban agencies there did something like this.

Still later we got computerized consoles with fully programmable encoders that could be selected by Cap Code, group-tone or even by dialing in the specific tones. One could easily mix tones from any group or make up your own. Most current consoles do this, the days of being restricted to one or two groups are long gone.

 

[ofd8001]

Around "our parts" two-tone paging is used for suburban fire department alerting. Each fire station has one two-tone for Fire calls and another two-tone for EMS calls. Then they may or may not be a command tone group for each of the 15 or so departments. The 7:00 PM tone test takes several minutes and all they do are the fire tones.

For bad weather alerting, rather than setting off that whole slew of tones, we have one single/long tone as an "All Call". That way every firefighter's pager is alerted at one time.

Not only does this shorten the amount of time to get the tone sounding done, most pagers will re-set after a fixed period of time. So we were seeing the top of the list pagers re-set before they even got to the voice announcement part.

As an aside, kind of interesting on how some tone combinations can work out, if care isn't exercised. For example Department 1 may have tones A/B and Department 2 may have tones C/D. A third department, 3, may have tones B/C. So if department 1 and 2 tones go out, one right after the other, Department 3's pagers (or back in the day Plectrons) were activated.

I worked as a dispatcher back in the mid 70's and we had a button to press to set off tones. If it was held down too long, the above predicament would happen. Got fussed at once or twice for that.

 

[N9JIG]

We had similar issues over the years with inadvertent tones setting off pagers. At the first town in the 70's and 80's there was another department in Wisconsin that had tones that were either the same or close enough that would occasionally set off the station tones at night or during inversions etc.

Later on, when I was with my other agency we were on an even busier channel and a couple of the stations would open on tones from some county in Michigan or Indiana as they used more common Plectron tones. It happened often enough that they switched to DTMF encoding, possible when they bought the Zetron encoder.

Later on a friend of mine was tasked with setting up station alerting tones for his two stations and we went thru many tone combinations to find pleasing yet easily identifiable tones that would not be mistaken by ear for other local tones and would not be interfered with by other users on the channel. Since his town had CentraCom II consoles we could pull almost any tone combination and we tried them out on the PW channel at night, we had a total blast doing so and came up with usable tone sets for each station, a General tone and a separate Long Tone for the station alarm since the station receivers only opened on receipt of the tones.

 

[JASII]

Great replies. I guess that does bring up another question in my mind. How does tones coordination work? Is there any software for selecting combinations in an area that won't cause problems with others? My county had a several PSAPs over 10 years ago. So, there were a couple of "legacy" VHF fire channels as well as some other frequencies used for alerting.

Then, with a JPA (Joint Powers Agreement), they all came under one PSAP. A completely different set of VHF frequencies are now used for paging. One was a county repeater output and the other a PDs repeater output. It seems like one has all of the paging on it and the other carries fire traffic from the 800 MHz fire dispatch talkgroup(s).

I wasn't part of the planning for that changeover, but it was probably an opportune time for the fire departments to think long and hard about how they wanted tones used. I assume that if they were spending the time and money anyway to re-program pagers, they might just as well add any new ones at that time, if they needed them.

Since all of the fire departments are now paged out by one communications center, it is probably a bit easier to coordinate.

Now that "custom" tones are used, how far apart do they need to be from one another to be a "distinctively" different tone?


For example, these two pairs were logged when I wasn't monitoring:

2065.7 2070.0

2074.0 2070.0

Are they far enough apart to be two distinctively different tones or are they actually a Long Tone B that just happened to show two different frequencies in the log?

Another question, too. My fire department uses

979.9 1513.5

They do have some other tones, but this happens to be the pair that I hear used most frequently. Anyway, if a Long Tone B of 1513.5 is sent, would that "open up" a device with just the above? Or, if a Long Tone A of 979.9 is sent, would that "open up" that same receiver? I should point out that I don't know if that is what they are doing yet, I am still logging the tones being received. I think at least some of the departments are being paged out and the computer voice announces All Call and the all call tones seem to be completely different from either the A or B tones in that department. But some do seem to have a tone in common with the various stations, so I guess it just depends.

 

[N9JIG]

Newer pager and alert receivers can be programmed to open on multiple tone sets and provide different sounding alerts on each set, much like the Uniden scanners can. This means they can use just about any tone they want in any combination. This goes for General or multi-group tones. In old mechanical days a Long A or Long B would be used to open several groups at once but now any tone set can be used, even if totally unrelated to the others in the same pager. We had the original Minitor pagers, they had 2 Vibrasponder reeds so opened on the A-B or Long B. I don't recall if they worked on Long-A as well. We had 2 stations so each used the same tones, just reversed so if we swapped stations we just opened the radio and reversed the reeds. Later we got newer Minitor II's that had 3 reeds of the smaller variety and this allows more tone combinations to be used.

Back in the Plectron and Minitor days since they used mechanical reeds or filters so they were limited to a certain amount of tones and one had to have the right reeds for them. Encoders too were mechanical so they had a set group of tones they could use. While this limited you to a select set of tone possibilities as long as other co-channel users used different groups the possibility of misdirected alerts was lessened. One of the reasons I got so fascinated by paging was due to setting up a new group of tones and needing to make sure we didn't get interfered with by other agencies on our very busy fire channel. It was not uncommon for us to hear other FD's 150 or 200 miles away on most nights and even farther during summer months.

I contacted all the agencies I know we could hear on the channel in several states and asked what tones they used. Most responded but some refused to tell me the tones. I took our logging recorder files and ran them thru Audition and decoded all the tones I could find for these and chose tones for the new system that would be unlikely to cause or receive inadvertent alerts.

There is no clearinghouse for tone out codes so for the most part you are on your own and hopefully if there is a problem someone can change a tone set to clear it up. We had another user on your fire channel from Indiana that was a county dispatch for a boatload of small departments and every Sunday they would send out the entire series of tones to test, it would take over 12 minutes to send them. They also refused to send me a list of their tones so I could avoid them so after I decoded them I sent the list to them for "confirmation" and let them know that if they interfered with our tones we would be happy to help them choose new ones. Had they cooperated I would have gone the other way and let them know I would be sure not to choose tones that would interfere with them. In reality I did choose tones so that they would not interfere but I was none too pleased with their response and attitude, hopefully they got the message.

As far as tone separation, the decoders and encoders are not all that precise so it is not uncommon for tolerances to be up to several Hz., usually getting larger as the tone freq gets higher. That is why tones at the lower end (300-900 Hz.) tend to be closer together than higher ones. Your example of 2065.7 and 2070.0 are close enough together that they would probably open receivers set to the other freq.

 

[ofd8001]

When narrow banding came on the horizon, we had to change our tone and voice frequency. We were fortunate enough to get a "true" paging frequency that wasn't used as far as we could determine.

That presented the opportunity to re-configure all of our tone groups from the Plectron to the Quick Call II format. It was kind of interesting to do that. There was an actual method to the madness. The first tone (Tone A) was unique to each department (there were about 18 at the time. Tone B was unique to each station for that department. On fire calls, Tone B would be lower than Tone A. On medical calls, Tone B is higher. So if monitoring the frequency one would know right away whether its a fire or medical call.

Also, unlike Brother Rich, our area isn't as densely populate with so many fire departments and we didn't have those challenges.

As he mentioned, just like with PL tones, there is no pager tone coordinator. Most often, folks take their best shot and keep fingers crossed until you hear otherwise. Of course before everything is cast in concrete, tone tests are done which hopefully reveal conflicts.