Hellfire Heroes

[Jay911]

Been watching this show on Discovery this season, showcasing Lesser Slave River Fire Service and Yellowhead County Fire Rescue. I'm impressed that both agencies use the exact same tone to alert their halls (which is tone A of my department's tones - my blood pressure hates that), and have MDC1200 plus FRS roger beeps on what seem to be both VHF analog and DMR per the radios shown and heard. Actually I remember at least one AFRRCS radio in an early episode too. I guess plain old comms without squawks and beeps isn't sexy enough for TV.

 

[slicerwizard]

The so called "reality" shows are big on adding extra sounds. Heavy Rescue has every other driver leaning on the horn as they pass a stopped vulture.

 

[Jay911]

Same production company, I think. Yeah, they have some infatuation with looping in all kinds of audio that doesn't belong. Every tow truck winch motor sounds the same and has a heavy clunk and screech when the slack is taken out of the line. Vehicles passing by are on the horn, like you say. The only thing less fictional, at least on HR401, is the part where all the tow drivers are polite and nice to one another and don't run themselves and civilians off the road to secure a job...

 

[slicerwizard]

And no gouging customers or steering them to body shops for kickbacks.

Hey, they're just alternate facts...

 

[BC_Scan]

I too have enjoyed this show, watched all 5 episodes, I noticed in the opening sequence the handheld they show is a Moto, and in one episode where there was a stuck elevator it appears they were using them as tac simplex, I also noticed last time I drove thru Yellowhead on way to Edmonton they still where using that Passport/Ltr ? system , now they have shiny new Moto, are they part of your AFRRCS ? or other , a quick look in DB did not yield info. Just curious. Interesting that they roll such great distances , but do not appear to use any kind of Combined Events channel to communicate with Ambulance.

 

[Jay911]

Yellowhead is on AFRRCS these days (at least past monitoring has shown evidence of talkgroups for them). One time early in the show, I did see Chief Coutts from LSRFS say "Dispatch, 102 on AFRRCS" (I think).

LSRFS appears to have KMC-41 mics from Kenwood, which are their analog radio mics (at least, not recommended with the NX5000 line because they don't support the noise canceling that the NX-series mic has).

Last week's episode showed an XPR mobile in Chief Bahri's truck. The screen was hard to read but I think it read "West 1" as the channel.

AFRRCS has common event talkgroups, one per each county/region and 5 per each of the 7 biggest urban municipalities. EMS has "mutual aid" channels for each of their dispatch zones, and appears to be sharing them with partner agencies - I heard Arrowwood Fire talking to STARS Air Ambulance the other day on one, and my agency talks to our local EMS responders on another.

 

[SCPD]

Yellowhead is primary on DMR with secondary usage on AFFRCS. LSRFS is still using analogue, they might have patches to AFFRCS but I didn't catch any when I was through there last week.

 

[BC_Scan]

It appears that the depracted Yellowhead PS system in DB does not reflect the change to DMR, perhaps someone with more knowledge of TG's etc could update. So FD is still on VHF as you say Primary DMR secondary AFRRCS.

 

[mciupa]

For Yellowhead, are these frequencies and sites still valid from the MPT-1327 for use in DMR?

Site	Name	Freqs	 
	Edson	159.510c	169.200a
	Clarke Lake	154.280c	170.265a
        Hinton	149.185c	169.200a
	Elk River	149.185c	 
	Obed Mountain	151.625c	153.920a
	Hanlon	169.095c	 
	Carrot Creek	153.980c	159.225a
	Evansburg North	159.510c	169.200a

 

[SCPD]

They have all been recycled and reallocated all over the county. I haven't been able to determine LCN's for all of them yet. TAFL has all the updated frequency assignments.