Here's a few pics from the very early part of my career. I started with the Brevard County Sheriff's Office in Titusville, Florida in Nov, 1979 as an explorer in the Communications Center and ended up going full time 8 months later. When I started, the comm center's radio room had a GE Series 2500 Command Control Console (this unit was manufactured by Secode for GE), a Mastr Controller (tone remote) that had been removed from it's normal housing and placed into a console setting (very nice worksmanship BTW), and a GE TCC desktop remote hidden in the back of the large wood console which worked a old Motorola DC Motrac base on 155.370 (we had a speaker, footswitch to key, and a fixed Shure console mike on the console). We had a Motorola Moden 36 (later upgraded to Moden 100) paging encoder hooked to the 2500 console we used for administrative paging and SWAT callouts.
Over the years swapping and trading I actually acquired most of the old 2500 after it had been used for a dispatch simulator and was surplused as a hand-me-down from a local PD. I might still have it in storage along with the manuals and heavy metal turret. The individual channels were each modulized, there were little light bulbs behind most of the lit indicators which frequently burned out and were a pain to change (yes, I had that task many times). Our console had three tone remote modules, one DC module with a two-frequency adjustment, and a separate bay with the simul receiver for the DC module. We only used one line on the second receiver module (it had two lines) so we hooked a scanner to the second line with the audio coming from the local PD's primary dispatch channel. Came in handy a few times coordinating pursuits and other multiple-jurisdiction type incidents.
Our 2500 had an annoying quirk or two. One of note, there was a big red transmit bar that was on the bottom of the center part of the console for the dispatcher to use which activated channel(s) that were selected. Over years of use, the springs tended to wear out, allowing the microswitch to be activated with a very light touch. More then once some rather direct comments not intended for air were broadcast due to a bad switch
. Another was the repeat enable/disable commands for tone remote were not received at the repeater correctly all the time. We had a protocol called "10-55x" where the dispatcher would momentarily disable the repeater to receive sensitive information from a patrol unit on the input. You'd push the button and "REPEAT DISABLE" would illuminate, you'd tell the unit to go ahead, he'd tell you whatever secret squirrel information he wanted you to have, then he'd clear the 10-55x with you. At that point, you'd push the button to turn the repeater back on. Sounds good, except it was a crapshoot if the repeater would actually disable. We found out years later the repeat disable tone was slightly off frequency, probably just enough for the station to reject the function tone on a random basis. There were ten zillion adjustments on the old 2500, seems everything had a trim pot or two!
Just a note, Motorola used to have a console that looked similar to the old original GE CCC, it was pre-Modcom (1960's) vintage. Orlando Police Department used to have one for a dispatch simulator, but it was made away with many years ago.
Enjoy the pics!
Eric
