44 Control tones (attached audio file)

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Dispatrick

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I've been a long time monitor of "44 Control" and there is one pager tone I've always believed sounds rather cool, my question is, what type of paging system do they use that produces it?

attached is the tone in an audio file.
 

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SteveC0625

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I've been a long time monitor of "44 Control" and there is one pager tone I've always believed sounds rather cool, my question is, what type of paging system do they use that produces it?

attached is the tone in an audio file.
My handy-dandy tone decoder app on my phone says its 470.5 (Group 4 Tone 7) and 726.8 (Group 5 Tone 5) which would make it standard Quik Call II tones. But......

My ear says it actually sounds more like one of the old Quik Call I page tones which are actually a simple chord composed of two tones.That's why they called them 2+2. Modern day Quik Call II, Plectron, and others are 1+1.

And the timing sounds like QC-I as well: 1 second of the first tone, 200 ms space and then 1 second of the second tone. QC-II would be 1 second/0 sec/3 second.

You don't hear QC-I much these days because most of the current crop of pagers don't deal with 2+2 very well. Older alerting radios like the M03's and L03's were actually designed to handle 2+2. The big old tube jobs that everybody had back in the 1960's and 1970's actually had 4 tone reeds in them to properly decode 2+2.

My admittedly sometimes shaky memory tells me that the the Minitor I had 4 reed slots and could handle 2+2 QC-I. It would have been the last to do so, at least from Motorola.

If it is QC-I, it's entirely possible that someone is still using one of those old desk top beasts as a station tone.
 

GTR8000

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You are hearing a Motorola Quik-Call I (QCI) tones (think of the old show Emergency!).

Rockland uses a mixture of QCI and DTMF tones for fire station alerting. These tones activate a QCI or DTMF receiver, which in turn triggers a relay that re-encodes the Quik-Call II (QCII) pager tones from the local firehouse base station, as well as activates any horns or whistles the firehouse may have.

These are not used to alert pagers, as no modern pager is QCI capable. As the old QCI firehouse decoders are dying off, they are being replaced with modern DTMF decoders. There is a mixture of Plectron, Motorola, and Federal Signal QCI decoders still in use, some dating back to the 60s.

Rockland has been using QCI tones for many decades. Up to just a few years ago, all 26 fire departments in Rockland used QCI tones, however that is now down to 16 departments. 10 departments have switched to the newer DTMF format for the aforementioned reason.

All pager tones in Rockland are QCII format, although not necessarily from the Motorola tone plan. Many use Plectron or Federal Signal tones as well.

All fire department dispatch tones in Rockland on 46.18 MHz and 470.800 MHz are encoded by 44-Control's MCC 7500 consoles in the 911 Center at the Fire Training Center in Pomona. This includes the QCII pager tones, the QCI station tones, the DTMF station tones, and the Knox DTMF tones.
 

LathamScan

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I agree. It does sound like an older Quik Call I (2+2) tone. There are still some fire stations in Rensselaer County that have their sirens activated via these tones. The other stations whose decoders have aged and died have switched to a DTMF sequence to activate their sirens.

We used to use QCI to activate sirens here in the Town of Colonie on 46.46 until the P25 trunk system went online. Now the 800 MHz. radios at each firehouse are used to activate the sirens by paging the specific station over the control channel.
 

SteveC0625

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For those that might be interested, here's a link to a page that has lots of info on QC-I. It's oriented towards LA County and the old Emergency tv show, but still has much detail about QC-I. There's even info on an app to produce QC-I tones on your phone.

http://www.policeinterceptor.com/emerg.htm

Upstate in western NY, Monroe County used QC-I well into the '90's. It was station only by then so most departments were toned out with a QC-I set and then a QC-II or Fast Plectron tone set.
 
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DaveNF2G

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Ahh, the good old days. :)

I could identify by ear almost any FD tones and all 4 (at the time) RFD battalion tones, protectives, and line deputy when everything was QCI and Plectron. The changeover to QC2 made it much harder to distinguish some of the combinations.
 
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