Ingham county system beeps

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jdc50

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lansing michigan
I every so often get about 10 beeps on the system. They are not the soft sounding emergency beeps but rather loader. There does not seem to be any reason for them as far as radio traffic. Does anyone know what they are? Is there a setting to get rid of them?

Thanks
 

bigbluemsp

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Most likely station ID. The FCC is starting to crack down on the departments that don't id their channels. The city here had to do that.
 

rdale

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At the end of every EDACS transmissions there are a few beeps, if you are getting a good signal your radio will stop receiving before that happens. You can always hear in conventional mode...
 

ghostship

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Do you hear them during a transmission? There is a Time-Out feature that automatically closes Open Mic's, that gives warning beeps designed to alert the operator to the condition allowing them to end transmission. If not corrected quickly, the system automatically ends the transmission. You'll hear this on the LEIN channel frequently when they don't break their trans into small enough pieces.
 

gg750

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Is Ingham Co./City of Lansing fully up and running on the EDACS system now? Last time I was down there (several months ago), they were still testing the EDACS. I'm heading down that way next weekend and wanted to get a head start on programming.

G
 

Roz

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Yes, all police and fire agencies are now using the system. If you are coming down next weekend and are interested in listening to the MSU football game it seems they are using the TRI MUT talkgroup for all police operations and the TRI TAC1 talkgroup for all fire/ems operations.
 

ncarpenter

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I'm also hearing these "beeps" coming from the system. They seem to come at random, I've noticed on "EL MSU P" TG305. They're not station IDs, and they don't sound like tx termination sounds you would hear if you were just listening to a control channel without trunking. And I don't think they are TOT warning sounds, because I've never heard anyone talking before the beeps. Just some weird system beep I guess?

/EDIT
Alright, now that I've been monitoring for a while, I beleive that they are infact TOT (Time Out Timer) alert tones. Open mics that are held open too long are automatically terminated by the user's radio after a pre-determined amount of transmission time. These beeps are "pre-TOT warning tones", notifying the user that they only have about 5 seconds of talktime left before they must re-transmit. Usually when I've heard these tones, however, I've never heard any voice. Perhaps the mic switches are extremely sensitive, or the radio failed to drop the system after the user released the mic? Dunno, but I hope that helps.
 
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radio777man

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Edacstech

The tones you are hearing are most likely what is referred to in EDACS as "Dotting". This goes way back to the early EDACS systems which were developed by GE. Back then they actually played the "GE - WE BRING GOOD THINGS TO LIFE" song with these beeps whenever a user unkeyed and dotting is just set up in the system to do nothing other than confound conventional scanners because while the tones are playing, it locks the scanner on that frequency for the duration of the tones which means by the time the tones are done playing your conventional scanner has probably missed other traffic on the talkgroup which has already trunked off to other channels.

Trunking capable scanners are capable of ignoring dotting because they are listening to the control channel and receive instructions as soon as the next user on the talkgroup keys up which immediately sends the scanner to the next channel the traffic has landed on.

Also, dotting goes away immediately if the system is completely busy and another user keys up on a separate talkgroup. The system shuts off dotting and immediately assigns the user to the free channel.
 

rdale

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No, what he's talking about are the timeout beeps that occur if a user keeps the mic button depressed for too long...
 

ncarpenter

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I thought what 777 refers to as "dotting" was just a termination signal for EDACS radios to drop the channel and return to the controller once the transmission ended?

Are they actually to hold the channel open for conventional receivers without EDACS decoding capabilities?
 

ceranes

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The entire system is up and running except for the Hospitals. I believe they installed equipment in Ingham Medical Hospital this week. I haven't heard any activity on the Sparrow or St Lawrence talkgroups yet.
 
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