jaymatt1978
Member
Getting a brief hit on 462.9750 PL 146.2 down here in Cape May when I lived in Bergen County this was Jersey City Medical Center dispatch.Do they still use it???
Jersey City Med Center
- Thread starter jaymatt1978
- Start date
JCMC is dispatched on NJICS by RWJ (MedCentral).
jaymatt1978
Member
ok so this was ducting. Thanks
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- Dec 1, 2006
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It wasn't JCMC. As stated they are now on the NJTCS. I worked on JCFD from 1992 and JCMC was on an 800 commercial repeater until 9-11-01 when that system went down with the towers and then went back to the VHF 155-235 channel they were originally on until they switched to the state system.
found this using RR database search for frequency and pl tone. Mercer County PA
902
Member
Just for the sake of historic accuracy, the MC went from 155.235 to a Motorola-owned SmartNet 900 MHz system. They were never on 800.
The JEMS plan did not authorize dispatch on UHF, even though the 1986 implementation of HUDCEN included a "Mixer" feature on MED 9 and 10, similar to FDNY and NYCEMS. As "MC-11," the communications coordinator and designer of the 1986 iteration of the HUDCEN facility, I had intended to move dispatching operations to one or the other. BRAVO (Bay Ridge Volunteer Ambulance Organization) in Brooklyn used one of the two frequencies for their dispatch and coordination. At the time, NJ OEMS did not want any activity coopting MED 9 or 10 to a single agency dispatch. MED 10 had originally been investigated as an annunciator display channel for open MED channels at the various MICU dispatch facilities. It didn't work because all of the base stations at each of the communications centers were not simplex, but semi-duplex.
Originally the MC operated on 155.265 but was heavily interfered with by Hatzolah before they switched to 160 MHz. The MC changed from 265 to 235 around 1984. In 1986, a voting comparator and additional channels (JEMS 2, 3, and SPEN/JEMS 4) were added to establish a Hudson County EMS control point with DTMF decode, per the JEMS plan. This was replaced circa 1991 by the leasted talkgroups. JCMC did not own the trunked system, similar to McCabe's 800 dispatch in the mid-80s being a community repeater on the WTC. McCabe's also switched to the 900 MHz SMRs.
The 900 system was divided between the World Trade Center and Claridge House in Verona and required a scanning radio. Jersey City and Hudson County were in such position that the WTC overshot much of the region and did not cover the west side. Claridge House had to cover that area.
The VHF simplex system was reactivated immediately after 9/11. In subsequent years until their move to NJICS, they repeaterized 155.235 and moved the repeater off the Surgical Building (the middle building in the original Medical Center complex) to the Hudson County administration building. A second repeater frequency was added.
NJICS addressed a longstanding spectrum shortage in Northeastern NJ. When I was a paramedic at the MC (circa 1985 - 1987), private ambulance services in Staten Island, licensed at power levels much higher than the MC, would frequently obliterate communication. Building out the voting receivers helped, but did not entirely solve the problem. In 1986, we solved some of the problem by brute force, buying 110 Watt Syntor X9000 mobile radios.
902
Member
Thank you for remembering.
They did that on the PA in the ambulance garage, too, by hitting the buttons on the keypad and going, "TEN GOES!"
I was one of the first few paramedics to work out of McCabe's on MC-14. I transferred over to NJ's non-transporting ALS after having been a NYCEMS paramedic. It was rough working in a protocol-based system where you only spoke to a physician when you got past a certain point in the protocols, then moving over to a "mommy, may I?" system of online medical control, where, if you did not have contact with the physician, you were an EMT without a transporting ambulance. (Usually) having cool physicians helped in that respect.
The original radio system you were listening to was a Motorola Micor non-unified chassis in a T2-2R configuration (a 2 channel DC remote transmitter with two separate receivers in the radio). It was nothing more than a HEAR radio base station that had 155.265 on one receiver and 155.340 on the other. The Hatzolah incident made the leadership at the time change channels to 155.235, which was shared with some of the Essex co. volley squads. The older buses had Motorola Mocom-70 radios that still had 155.265 in them. The antenna was on the Medical Building. It was a 1/4 wave folded "trombone." Several weeks after the Bayonne startup , we noticed a sharp decrease in coverage. One of the local hams got permission to put a 2 meter repeater on the roof. He chose the vent pipe the trombone was bolted to to mount his mast. It was about 2 inches away from the antenna. His excuse was it looked abandoned. About the same time we had a "10-2" in Curries Woods. Open up the MX and the ambulette service in Staten Island was yacking about pickup schedules. Nothing got through.
So, the buildout of the "new HUDCEN" ("MC" was in the foyer of the ambulance garage, "Hudson" was a Flintstones style dispatch center upstairs, and "HUDCEN" [HUDson county Communications Emergency Network] was one of the training rooms above the ambulance garage converted into two operator positions and the Flintstones desk. Conveniently, the Statue of Liberty Centennial was on the schedule. The Flintstones setup wouldn't cut it, so the hospital funded the build-out of a new facility. With that came a voting receiver for 155.235 and 155.280 at Bayonne Hospital, along with a T8-R8 (8 channel tone remote) MED channel semi-duplex base station, and a MED 9 and MED 10 base station that was capable of "mixer" operation. This was duplicated at the West New York Town Hall for MC-16, and Jersey City had new resources in the Surgical Building (wading through a floor of garbage to get to where the stations were located). 155.340 was also on the Surgical Building, but without voting receivers.
The console was a Kustom ProComm. It worked fairly well, and had two dispatcher positions next to each other, plus Epic tone remote consoles for the physician to read the ECG either in HUDCEN or 3 consoles in the ER. There were two things that bugged me - first, some of the dispatchers absolutely could not understand that they should assign the closest MED channel base station to the call, and NOT the base station closest to where the unit parked. Just because MC-14 got sent to Guttenberg didn't mean they could use the Bayonne Hospital site for medical control. Same with 16 going into Bayonne. West New York was a stretch to get to Bayonne. No matter how I tried to frame it, some people just didn't get it. The other thing was the ringing noise in the console when it was keyed. You could hear it in the background, not as loud as someone running a vacuum cleaner, but you could hear it. We deliberately put carpet on the walls so people didn't get the "MC" sound (the punch cards sounded like someone banging a 2x4 on the desk). When I came back for 9/11, I immediately knew what they were using just by that ringing noise in the background. First thought through my head was, "Geez, they turned that thing back on?!" It must've been a shock for the puppy EMTs and medics that were working with the Motorola trunked system for 7 or 8 years.
Final thought: the Zetron Model 25 encoders. Somebody discovered that the ALERT 4 button played the Flintstones "Charge It!" tones twice. Never underestimate boredom punctuated by, "What's this button do?" Add to that, one particular person refusing to say the "W" in WNGK988. So, for the first few times, you may have heard two ALERT 4s with "NGK988 the time is 1600 hrs, be alert and stay alive." Not necessarily because anyone wanted them to say it. That lasted until I could get new PROMs shipped from Zetron. In retrospect, it was the next generation's version of the original cast's "WEMS!" (IYKYK).
It was an adventure. Kinda like a combination of WKRP in Cincinnati and the Wild West.
tomk62
Member
I can corroborate everything 902 is saying, I worked JCMC EMS from 1992 to 1994. We were on 155.235. I frequently was assigned JC-5 noon to midnight on weekends.
RBFD415
Member
Since it was mentioned above, and I have not heard of BRAVO EMS in years I thought it worth mentioning that here in Monmouth County we used to listen to BRAVO on 462.950. We monitored that MED Channel (MED 9) as it was used as a clandestine chit-chat freq for a law enforcement agency long before cell phones and the "E" word.
Out of curiosity is BRAVO still around and what type of communication scheme are they using if so?
Great detailed information and memories included in your posts, Thank You for sharing!
Out of curiosity is BRAVO still around and what type of communication scheme are they using if so?
Great detailed information and memories included in your posts, Thank You for sharing!
902
Member
I reached out to a friend who follows NYC's volunteers. I'm told they're using radio emulation over LTE, but still have the MED-9 capability.
There was a lot of behind the scenes stuff at the MC in those days. It was very "busy" having to do the engineering and technical liaison work, project management, and start-up proposals while still riding the line as a paramedic in an urban system. Much of the work was done on "days off," and in between calls.
I would have liked to have experimented with CAD at the time, and did visit Ray Lax at North Hudson Regional Fire Control to see his CAD operation there, but there was no traction on it. We did procure a mini PDP-11 with 8 inch floppies from a defunct research project elsewhere. I did learn how to bootstrap the machine. It went about that far.
