Metro Transit Talkgroup 2502

[JASII]

It is interesting listening when Metro Transit has an "incident" aboard a bus and the audio is transmitted.

 

[sfd119]

Care to elaborate for those of use who didn't hear it or don't live close by?

 

[JASII]

They must have had an assault of some sort. The microphone was "hot" for quite a period of time and you could here the audio of the witnesses and victims as they were using a lot of urban street language. If I recall correctly, the system they have set up is designed to do that very thing, too. I think a button is selected and it sends an an emergency signal to the Transit Control Center (TCC) The microphone goes live and video is being recorded so that peeps in the TCC can pass along information to the squads responding. I doubt that I have ever heard that before, but then it is rare that monitor Metro Transit, except I do have the Transit PD talkgroups in my scan list.

 

[ofd8001]

That's a standard feature on radios that can be turned on/off via programming. The system administrators can choose whether to have the radio's microphone "hot" so they can listen in just as you describe. All part of how creative they want to be in certain situations.

 

[Jennifer_rose]

When a driver trips the silent alarm it sends a live feed to the control center. Drivers have several priority levels when calling the control center. During a silent alarm, the control center will not call the driver back until the driver downgrades the call. Police are automatically dispatched to the bus during a silent alarm.

During radio maintenance they can go into what is known as fallback mode. At that point there are no priority levels and the driver can just key up a mic to contact the control center. When that happens every bus can hear Transmissions back and forth.