ADA county FD alarm tones

AC7FD

Member
Joined
Apr 21, 2019
Messages
11
Location
Meridian, ID
Hi Forum,

please excuse my lack of knowledge as I just started monitoring the fire traffic a few weeks ago.
I try to understand how the local fire departments are getting their alarm from dispatch.
I used to listen to my local department in another state 10 years ago and they received an analog 2 tone alarm on a VHF frequency.
I also used to monitor Pocsag alarms when I lived in Europe for a while.
My local FD is Meridian, ID and I hear Ada County and Canyon Counity dispatch over the ICAWIN P25 system listening to the ADA County simulcast and I hear sometimes tones but I have no clue how I can figure out which ones belong to Meridian FD. I found a list of Stations and the Meridian FD vehicles are labeled 31 for station 1, 32 for station 2 and so on but I wonder how I get the alarm codes. I do have a Uniden BCD536 and a SDS200, can I somehow decode and record the tone frequencies with these scanners? I found the feature to open to certain tone frequencies but didn’t see a feature to record them all with dispatch message (to download them all once a day and start a list).
I also have an Airspy SDR that works great to monitor in case there is some software that can do what I‘m looking for.
Or is there already a list I didn’t find?
My end goal is to program my fire pager with the Meridian alarm tones to just monitor the local activities.

Thanks for any hints how to figure this out.
 

AC7FD

Member
Joined
Apr 21, 2019
Messages
11
Location
Meridian, ID
I‘d like to update my post.
I’ve done a lot of research since posting the initial questions and learned a lot how this system works. There is still a lot to learn.
I monitored Ada and Canyon county together in the past. I stopped listening to Canyon and focus fully on Ada. The tones I heard in the past were mostly from Canyon. Ada seems to not or very seldom use them.
I learned a lot about radio ID’s and a whole new world opened when I discovered TrunkSDR and ProScan.
This hobby is great, a lot to learn.
 
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