I need to backtrack a little bit to give everyone a little history about how things were before OC911 came into existence:
The Orange County Sheriff's Office "339" provided dispatch Services for Town of Goshen PD, Village of Goshen PD, Town of Chester PD, Village of Chester PD, Village of Florida PD and a few other PDs that I cannot remember at the moment. For many years, they were on a lowband radio system in the 33-39mhz band. In the early 90s, they switched over to a VHF radio system with a frequency of 155.850. There was only 3 towers for this VHF system, 1 tower in Goshen, 1 on Grahmsville & 1 on Beacon. Coverage on mobile radios was decent. Portable coverage was crappy unless you were very close to one of the towers. The PDs that had their own dispatchers were Tuxedo, Tuxedo Park, Woodbury, Harriman, Monroe, Cornwall, New Windsor, City of Newburgh, Town of Newburgh, Walden, City of Middletown, Town of Wallkill and Town of Crawford (who was dispatched by NYSP). These PDs either had their own VHF repeaters or shared VHF repeaters with each other. Most to them had decent mobile & portable radio coverage.
Fire Dispatch "KEE 315" provided fire dispatch services for all departments expect for Tuxedo, Woodbury, Monroe, Cornwall, New Windsor, Vails Gate, the FDs that cover the Town of Newburgh, City of Newburgh, City of Middletown (I may have left out a few). KEE 315 and some of the departments listed above paged out fire calls on 154.205. At the time, I think there was 4 towers used for paging: Arden, Beacon, Graham & Local. It was up to the dispatchers to select the correct tower for the department they were paging. All communications into KEE 315 were on 46.22 and all communications out of KEE 315 were on 46.16. All truck to truck communications were done on 46.16. When units were operating at an incident, they would often use 46.30 & 46.40 for fire ground. Fire Police used 46.12. Since all of the sites were high power and most apparatus had 110 watt mobile radios, truck to truck and truck to dispatch communications were halfway decent. Fire Ground communications were terrible if you were inside of the concrete & steel building. Realizing this, many departments began using VHF or UHF portable radios for FG communications.
EMS Communications were a giant mess back then too. Some volunteer ambulance services (Chester, Goshen & some others that I cannot recall at the moment) were dispatched by a private answering service (Cullens Communications), paging was done with little Motorola Keynote pagers. The answering service had to call a phone number, speak the dispatch message, hang up the phone and wait for the page to be sent in the order it was received. They also provided answering services for plumbers, electricians, doctors officers and hospitals. A page for a plumber could have priority over an EMS page if the page for the plumber was sent before the EMS page. Communications between the ambulance services and the answering service were done on 153.860. This frequency was also used by the OC Sheriff's Office dispatchers as "WAU718" to keep track of what ambulances were in and out of service in the County. The other ambulance services, who were not dispatched by Cullens Answering Service, were dispatched by the local PDs that had their own dispatchers i.e. Tuxedo, Monroe, Woodbury, New Windsor, Town of Newburgh, Cornwall, Warwick, Greenwood Lake.
I may have accidentally forgot some information about how the services were dispatched, so you guys are free to chime in and add in anything that I may have left out.
