BCD396XT/BCD996XT: Fire Tone Out for beginner

[adymoe]

Im confused on one factor with this FTO feature...if the tones go out for my station and it alerts me, they proceed to broadcast the call...how does my scanner know when dispatch is talking to my local department? It wont...what Im saying is the scanner will only sound an alert if my local dept is paged which is fine but sometimes the dispatcher will transmit more information minutes following the call...will the scanner play this audio? I dont want to hear traffic for another dept. but I guess if dispatch shares the same frequency for multiple deptlartments I have no choice

 

[Voyager]

That depends on your delay settings. If 2 seconds, it will only stay open for 2 seconds after a transmission. If set to Infinite, it will play anything until you manually reset it.

Many times multiple departments will get paged to the same call. This happens with one announcement, so you will hear other department announcements sometimes.

 

[ofd8001]

The FTO feature pretty much mimics the behavior of pagers carried by firefighters. If the correct set of tones are transmitted, the pager/scanner audio unmutes and stays unmuted the the duration of time established by programming.

Our fire department pagers were set to stay open for 32 seconds, which is a Motorola value and the closest Uniden has is 30 seconds. More often than not, this is a sufficient amount of time. However some times there is a lot of information pushed out by the dispatcher (Units to respond, nature of call, address of call, box number, cross streets, etc.) a pager would re-set itself before the dispatcher finished.

Also as Voyager said, with automatic mutual aid, multiple departments can be dispatched to the same call. In my area, more often than not, a structure fire call will involve at least two and as many as four, different fire departments on the initial dispatch. (It's done so as to meet National Fire Protection Association Standards on getting X number of firefighters to a scene in Y number of minutes).

 

[adymoe]

Okay I guess ill figure it all out but just an FYI for you guys I live in Canada and in my county it is very rare that more than one station gets dispatched to a call in my town. 90% of thd time my local station is the sole responder to calls in my town

 

[Voyager]

I guess you guys haven't yet had the lawsuits for "not sending enough units" to calls. Or maybe NFPA's tentacles haven't reached into Canada yet. It's an issue in some parts of the USA. But, if your one department is the sole one dispatched for 90% of the calls, then 90% of the time that's all you will hear on the FTO feature unless you use Infinite delay in which case you may hear other calls. I prefer using Infinite and resetting it manually, but that's personal preference. I'm guessing OFD likes using the 30 second delay. There is no right or no wrong setting. It's all in what you want.

 

[ofd8001]

Yep on 30 seconds - too lazy to reset manually

Plus our dispatch frequency is pretty active as there are some 17 fire departments dispatched by the communications center.

 

[adymoe]

Okay, will a stock antenna work well enough to recieve transmissions from dmr mototrbo radios? Im not sure how they work and if towers are nearby? I am aware of decoding as well

 

[ofd8001]

FTO is a conventional firequency thing. DMR Mototrbo is not something I've ever heard of being used for fire paging purposes as no pager receivers "handle" this type of radio transmission.

But yeah, the stock antenna should receive such transmissions - they are usually the same radio "horse-power". Scanners just can't decode the data they receive into something intelligible.

 

[adymoe]

Sorry I should clarify more, I meant firefighters portables specifically. Yes dispatch does use conventional. I was just wondering if my stock antenna can pick up the dmr portables

 

[N9JIG]

Whether the signal is DMR or analog won't make any real difference as far as an antenna is concerned. As long as the radio you are using can demodulate the digital signals the antennas are no different.

Also remember that they may be using DMR capable radios in analog mode, these are often cheaper these days.

 

[Voyager]

You can pick up DMR with the same criteria you can pick up analog signals (clear enough path between you and the transmitter, close enough so the signal is strong, etc).

But, it's all academic because the Uniden scanners will not DECODE the DMR signal. So, unless you have a discriminator tap, you are out of luck.

 

[adymoe]

I had planned on adding a disc tap....but if the firefighter talking is over 1 kilometer away from my antenna it probably wont pick it up then right? Also if I use the FTO feature...I wont be able to monitor the dmr transmissions anyways?

 

[Voyager]

FTO has nothing to do with it.

Over 1 km away? Simplex, likely not (but maybe). Repeater should definitely be strong enough.