G5 alerts for multiple departments

[mk117]

My fire department has several of us that work at 2 different fire departments. We picked up a couple of the G5's and have been working on programming them.
Right now the two departments are set up under the same zone but at different knob positions. Is it possible to have them both under one knob position with 2-tone paging if they are different Rx frequencies?
The Zone & Channel setting only allows for one conventional frequency to be selected but all of the 2-tone talk groups can be selected.
The idea is we don't want to miss a page from one department because we are on the know position for the other department - and don't want to carry two pagers!
Thanks for your help.

 

[N6ML]

If they're both conventional (not on trunked systems), you may be able to program a third knob position for "Normal Scan" and list the two existing knob positions in its scan list. There's some risk of missing tones if there's activity on the other channel, though.

 

[Hop763]

If there on different receive frequencies that’s the only way I know to do it as well. Yes there is a risk of missing calls if the other frequency is receiving an active call.

 

[w2lie]

Put the two frequencies in the scan list and set the pager to silent scan. This will keep the pager in scan mode if voice traffic is on one of the channels. The pager will only come off scan if it notices tones. You won't hear any voice traffic unless your tones match.

If you setup the pager in priority scan, then only the priority channel will activate for tones.

 

[wa8pyr]

Put the two frequencies in the scan list and set the pager to silent scan. This will keep the pager in scan mode if voice traffic is on one of the channels. The pager will only come off scan if it notices tones. You won't hear any voice traffic unless your tones match.

If you setup the pager in priority scan, then only the priority channel will activate for tones.

How well does it do decoding tones when scanning multiple frequencies, ie how reliable? On commercial radios (Motorola, Harris and others of that ilk) scanning is not possible when in tone alert (paging) mode, as the scanning could cause the radio to miss part of the first tone and not unmute.

When the agencies to be paged are all on the same frequency, I've found that the G5 will allow alerting from multiple tones; you just select the desired tone pairs from the selective call list. It was fun for awhile but got pretty tiresome having the dang thing beeping madly away for every alert it receives when the county is busy.

 

[w2lie]

All I know is I keep a channel with 8 departments in a selective tone scan and it does very well with catching the tones.
I asked Unication this very question because a customer of mine wanted to do this. It was explained to me that as long as the pager is in silent scan, it would keep scanning on voice traffic and only stop if it detects a tone. it will then stop there to see if there are any matches. If there are no matches, then the pager goes back into silent scan to look for tones again.

Of course, while the pager is waiting for a tone match on a frequency A, there is a possibility that you could be missing a match on frequency B. But, that is still better than missing a page because you are listening to a 30 second dispatch on frequency A and the pager is tied up there so you can listen.

So the odds are greater to catch the tones on frequency B if you aren't staying on A because of voice traffic.

Again - this is how things were explained to me by Unication.

 

[krokus]

The idea is we don't want to miss a page from one department because we are on the know position for the other department - and don't want to carry two pagers!
Thanks for your help.

If you have more than one dispatch frequency, then you need more than one pager, if you want reliability.