Minitor IV Programming

[akscanner]

Hello,

I just purchased a Minitor IV online (haven't received yet) and am going to get it programmed by the shop (for now). I am having a hard time understanding how to specify the tones for the pager. Do I only have to provide the tones in Hz? I have decoded the tones I want and they come back to 536. However, I am a bit confused about the two-tone references that I have read here, as another department I decoded as two tones, one at 615 and the other, longer at 650. I happen to know both departments are dispatched by the same place on the same consoles.

I am new to pagers and tones, so any guidance about what information I need would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[W8RW]

I do not know how you are decoding the tones, but it would be good to get them to within 1 Hz or the pager may not decode reliably. If you are using software that does an FFT (like Cooledit), play around with the type of filtering and number of sample points to get better resolution. If you are going to get paged by someone, I am surprised they don't give you this information.

For the Minitor IV, the software accepts frequencies, so knowing the frequencies should work as long as you get them accurately. If you know the paging format, such as Motorola Quick Call II, then you can look at the chart and figure out what the actual tone frequencies are that are close to what you decoded. Check out the tone signaling chart that you can download from Midian:

http://www.midians.com/html/tone_signaling.asp

You also need to know the duration of the tones.

For example, one tone set I use is a two-tone sequence in QC II format, and the first tone is 1 second long of 688.3 Hz (code 154) and the second is 3 seconds long of 584.8 (code 151).