Fire Tone Outs - Is this Quick Call?

[cquinn3]

I'm trying to learn about fire tone outs.

The departments in my county are toned out with a 1 second and 3 second tone. My understanding is that this is Quick Call II.

But some people in the county, like fire coordinators and fire investigators, have their own tones which sound different. Their tones alternate between two frequencies (20 times) for a total of three seconds. Does this pattern have a name? Where can I find more info about it?

Example recording is attached (first 9 seconds)

 

[mikegilbert]

That's just an alert tone generated by the dispatch console.

 

[ofd8001]

The audio that I heard was a combination of a two-tone page and the console generated alert (that "warbling").

Two-tone paging is used by a majority of agencies the use tone and voice paging. There are other alerting formats that are coming into use, however, but scanners cannot deal with them as Fire Tone Out.

Quick Call 2 is one "flavor" of two tone paging, probably the most common. It is a Motorola product. Plectron has its own scheme of two tones. If you ever watched the old TV show Emergency, their tones were called "2 plus 2", which is two tones at once for the A tone, then another two tones at once for the B tone. This format isn't used very much, if at all.

Lastly there is a Group Call component of two-tone paging, most often what is called a "Long Tone B". This is simply what it sounds like, one very long tone. (Pagers can deal with this in Fire Tone Out).

Console alerts can take many forms and are highly agency dependent. Console alert tones are not "decode-able" by scanners with Fire Tone Out.

See the following for more information:

Motorola Quick Call 2 - Genave

Motorola Quick Call 2 – “QC2” Two-Tone Paging – Quick Call 2 is one of the many paging formats which are collectively known as Two-Tone paging. For most pages, the encoders produce two individual audio tones with specific timing, in sequence. The pagers receive the tones and examine them. If the...

genave.com

 

[dwh367]

Where I live the the fire department uses different sounds effects, after the tones are dropped, to designate what type of incident they are responding to. Before they even hear the dispatch voice they know whether it's a structure fire, a fire alarm, a medical run, etc.