HFD Tone Outs

[west5alpha]

Do all the stations hear the tone outs, or just the station Dispatch is calling?

 

[hfxChris]

It's a pretty simple system. Each station is assigned a set of two ones. The equipment (both the equipment in the station and the volunteer pagers if that station has volunteers) is always 'listening' on its assigned frequency but stays muted until it receives the set of tones it's programmed to respond to.
When it receives the correct set of tones, it makes an alert sound and unmutes the audio so they can hear the dispatcher.

 

[JGR]

How do you decode fire tone out on TMR?

 

[hfxChris]

Tone outs don't go over TMR, they're sent on conventional VHF transmitters.

 

[JGR]

Thanks for the reply, hfxchris. I've been hearing Fire Tones on New Brunswick TMR at the same time as on the VHF fire frequencies.

 

[hfxChris]

Thanks for the reply, hfxchris. I've been hearing Fire Tones on New Brunswick TMR at the same time as on the VHF fire frequencies.

Ok, some of their dispatching centres up there must transmit over both simultaneously. This thread was asking specifically about Halifax fire.

 

[JGR]

Yes. Was wondering if it was there also. Thank you.

 

[ty12122]

For what it's worth, Halifax Fire used to transmit the pages on the "Dispatch" talkgroup (in addition to VHF), but stopped doing so in the last couple of years.

 

[hfxChris]

Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that. As I recall, they started doing that right after they moved to TMR2. It didn't last too long either. Some of the tones sounded downright fierce when converted to digital.
I'm quite certain it was a technical reason why they started doing that, and not an operational reason. The paging receivers would've still been analog VHF. Maybe it had something to do with the bridges they were using between the new and old systems.