Just like now they have the SVX AI speaker mic + bodycam for the NEXT. Get bent axon! You even get a popup on the SVX page for help to apply for bodycam grants! haha
Unication made several generations of the Minitor for Motorola, and two-tone voice pagers are such a small slice of the market compared to two-way voice radios which include that feature that I would not be surprised at all if someone was making Minitors on behalf of Motorola.
store.unicationusa.com
But I see no reason not to actually move to digital paging at this point, and the single best reason to do it is to stop having to integrate legacy systems into today's equipment.
I guess you're not too familiar with the scope of the thousands of volunteer fire/EMS responders there are in the northeast who rely on simple and reliable tone signaling every day. No relying on third party providers or Internet/cell service, just public safety grade local transmitters that have worked for decades. Doesn't matter if it's old school analog paging, analog simulcast paging, or paging over P25 trunking...it's reliable. Yes, there is a place for other types of alerting such as alphanumeric paging or apps like IamResponding, and make no mistake volunteers are making extensive use of those services these days...but again, nothing wakes you up at 0300 quite like a Minitor pager.Tone signalling is as obsolescent as POTS telephone service. (Plain Old Telephone Service) and I'm kind of amazed that in 2025, fire/rescue paging is still done via tone signalling. It's not like digital pagers haven't been a thing for 40 years or so....absolutely paging could be integrated right into the P25 core system if it was deemed a desirable thing to do. Keep your alerting tones for the benefit of the first responders who cue to them like my dog cues to the sound of the refrigerator opening.
Regardless, you still missed the mark. We've got a few towns where all volunteer EMS personnel are issued personal APX portables for the countywide ASTRO 25 TDMA system. All of these radios have the Tone Signaling option, and paging via the trunked system has been the primary means of alerting for over a year, and it works flawlessly. The tones are generated by the system consoles, so there's no analog patch involved that degrades audio. Adding the Tone Signaling option to each radio dwarfed the cost of building out an analog simulcast network for paging, and paging over the simulcast trunked system allows for much greater range of coverage vs the legacy VHF base stations. It's a total win-win.
Unfortunately it doesn’t always work effectively on P25. In cases where a county is covered by multiple sites, you can’t guarantee that the alerting talkgroup will light up all the necessary sites, unless you set it to always light up all of those sites. That’s fine until one or more of the sites is busy when you try to page a run; if that happens the transmission is bonked unless you’ve got it set up for either hot start or all start (I forget which one, think it’s hot start), in which case it‘ll hit the sites it can hit and ignore the others. Then some people might miss the run.
It’s a recommendation, not a requirement. I forget the number, but I remember seeing and reading it.
Well nothing is a requirement unless adopted. Anyway, by recommendation do you mean the appendix?
I just don’t remember. I read it and stuck it in the file cabinet in my office; I retired two years ago, it may still be lurking in that file cabinet, unless my successor threw everything out.
