Orange County Florida FD Fire Tones

[gcopter1]

I'm a dedicated PD listener, have no experience listening to FD. I have an SDS100. Would like to know if Orange County Florida FD, does any dispatch via tones.
As far as I know, they all monitor Fire 1 Dispatch?
When I go shopping for groceries, I often see FD personnel shopping as well and I can hear the Fire 1 Dispatch channel, going off on their radios, just not sure if that is a paging function or just a general monitoring of the Fire 1 Dispatch talk group.

Want to know if, they use tones to dispatch, if at all, and if so, what is the frequency they use?
I see in the WiKi tone info just, no info as to what frequency they use to send the tones.

 

[james32746]

They don't use tones anymore. They used to have QCII paging on 453.125 and 453.7875, but was discontinued about 15 years ago.

 

[WX4JCW]

I'm a dedicated PD listener, have no experience listening to FD. I have an SDS100. Would like to know if Orange County Florida FD, does any dispatch via tones.
As far as I know, they all monitor Fire 1 Dispatch?
When I go shopping for groceries, I often see FD personnel shopping as well and I can hear the Fire 1 Dispatch channel, going off on their radios, just not sure if that is a paging function or just a general monitoring of the Fire 1 Dispatch talk group.

Want to know if, they use tones to dispatch, if at all, and if so, what is the frequency they use?
I see in the WiKi tone info just, no info as to what frequency they use to send the tones.

When they went Automated, all the station alerts are now sent through the Auto Dispatch system through hardline, I got to say it sucks not having tones, back in the day I'm so autistic I knew all the tones, mostly from dispatching and riding, however, the new system dispatches all stations simultaneously, back in the day even before the trunk system if they were banging out a structure response you could have up to 30 seconds of tones depending on who was dispatched, most engine and rescue response lets say Engine 51 and Rescue 70 the tones would last 5-10 seconds, so its all about response time and squeezing out every second possible to get the apparatus rolling

So figure 30 seconds of tones, I think during the day a unit had 2 minutes to come up responding, in EMS/Fire its actually a long time, plus if a tone doesn't work which happened it would delay more

 

[MTS2000des]

I believe the text to speech engine and CAD interface in use on OCFD is from US Digital, and USD touts them as a premiere customer:

Station Alerting

Help reduce emergency response times.

stationalerting.com

As cited in their report/puff piece, automated station alerting can save as much as a full minute off response times. If true, this does make a huge impact especially on structure fires.
We implemented MACH Alert as part of our radio system deployment. It is all 100 percent "silent" IP that uses both IV&D and our CEN to alert stations from a desktop application installed on the radio console PC. We could have implemented a CAD interface to do text to speech but opted not to.
I don't miss the ancient technology of dropping tones.

 

[WX4JCW]

I believe the text to speech engine and CAD interface in use on OCFD is from US Digital, and USD touts them as a premiere customer:

Station Alerting

Help reduce emergency response times.

stationalerting.com

As cited in their report/puff piece, automated station alerting can save as much as a full minute off response times. If true, this does make a huge impact especially on structure fires.
We implemented MACH Alert as part of our radio system deployment. It is all 100 percent "silent" IP that uses both IV&D and our CEN to alert stations from a desktop application installed on the radio console PC. We could have implemented a CAD interface to do text to speech but opted not to.
I don't miss the ancient technology of dropping tones.

I think it's more Nostalgia than practicality as far as the tones go, We are a Class 1 now as well as Orlando, the Chief who accomplished all this has moved on to become the Chief of Seminole Fire, and we have excellent response times as it stands.