Richmond / Columbia County EMS

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bed92186

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Gold Cross EMS frequencies for Richmond / Columbia Counties? The only IDs I have found listed were for law enforcement and fire only in Richmond County. Columbia County lists encrypted for law enforcement and fire. Are they actually on VHF?
 

gman4661

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In case you are interested, Gold Cross has ambulances in the following other counties:

Jefferson GA - county wide EMS services to include a resident manager. Dispatched by Jefferson Co. 911.
McDuffie GA - 1 or 2 ambulances, apparently for transports and possible supplement to McDuffie Co. EMS.
Aiken SC - the last I heard, 1 ambulance. Not clear on it's function as Aiken Co. EMS and SouthStar EMS struggle (and oftentimes fail) to provide coverage in a county nearly as large as the state of Rhode Island.
 

shajoe44

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Not sure of the number Gold Cross ambulances assigned to Aiken County but they are operating on the Aiken County EMS channel. If anyone wants to see how bad of shape the Aiken County EMS system is, just go watch the last 2 I-Team investigation reports done this past week by WRDW-TV. Really eye opening information.
 
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Not trying to hijack a thread but, since we’re talking about Gold Cross EMS... are any of you having difficulty with the dispatch side of their VHF frequency? The mobiles, and portables, sound great but dispatch always sound distorted or over modulated. It’s so bad at times that I can’t understand what the dispatcher is saying. It’s so bad, at times, that I’ve considered deleting the frequency from my scan list.
I’ve listened with my Whistler TRX-1 and my Uniden SDS 100. No difference in the dispatch audio on either radio.
Any of you have that same experience or do I have a setting wrong in my radios?
 

DanRollman

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If anyone wants to see how bad of shape the Aiken County EMS system is, just go watch the last 2 I-Team investigation reports done this past week by WRDW-TV. Really eye opening information.

Pretty good report, but the most important part is what they said at the beginning - that this is typical all across the country. It is. Sounds like Aiken County EMS is just like many other EMS systems across Georgia and the country.

DeKalb County, GA is very regularly "NAT" ("no available transports") with many pending calls. Grady EMS in Atlanta is the same way. In DeKalb, I hear NAT several times a week, and I am obviously not listening all the time, so it must be happening a lot more than that. Kudos to Aiken County, according to the news report, that they regularly call for assistance from neighboring EMS agencies. DeKalb doesn't seem to do that; they just hold the call until they get another DeKalb AMR ambulance available, even if the call might be very close to a neighboring jurisdiction. Even when they are not "NAT" it is often the case that there are so few available ambulances covering the county that response times are north of 30 minutes. In a rural area, that's not unexpected. In an urban area, it's pretty surprising. Sure, some of these calls are relatively low priority. But many are not. I regularly hear heart attacks, shootings, wrecks with life threatening injuries and other critical wait a very long time for an ambulance. I heard a call for a pediatric drowning at a local hotel pool and the dispatcher said they didn't have an ambulance to send (and it didn't sound like they were working to get one from anywhere else; just waiting). This is terrible for patients and family, but it must be really demoralizing for firefighter first responders too.

Dunwoody (in north DeKalb County) was one of the first local jurisdictions here to get particularly noisy about this issue, to no real effect. See
AMR ambulance service facing more questions over response time DeKalb ultimately agreed to station a few ambulances in Dunwoody, which - as far as I can hear - has done basically nothing since those ambulances just get dispatched from Dunwoody to calls in south DeKalb anyway. AMR made a bunch of commitments about response times and the like, but just violates them all the time and there's no meaningful enforcement anyway.

DeKalb politicians downplay this issue by pointing out that fire trucks get there pretty quick and start patient care anyway. True, but there are many medical emergencies for which your chance of survival decreases significantly the longer it takes to get you to definitive care in a hospital setting, regardless of whether an EMT or paramedic is there waiting for a ride with you.
 
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bed92186

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In case you are interested, Gold Cross has ambulances in the following other counties:

Jefferson GA - county wide EMS services to include a resident manager. Dispatched by Jefferson Co. 911.
McDuffie GA - 1 or 2 ambulances, apparently for transports and possible supplement to McDuffie Co. EMS.
Aiken SC - the last I heard, 1 ambulance. Not clear on it's function as Aiken Co. EMS and SouthStar EMS struggle (and oftentimes fail) to provide coverage in a county nearly as large as the state of Rhode Island.
Gold Cross has contracted with Aiken County for two 911 units. Gold Cross 19 & 20. Southstar has contacted three. Rescue 11, which is Aiken Rescue Squad runs a lot of calls for Aiken County. Jackson First Alert's 603 will run at times too.
 

shajoe44

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Not trying to hijack a thread but, since we’re talking about Gold Cross EMS... are any of you having difficulty with the dispatch side of their VHF frequency? The mobiles, and portables, sound great but dispatch always sound distorted or over modulated. It’s so bad at times that I can’t understand what the dispatcher is saying. It’s so bad, at times, that I’ve considered deleting the frequency from my scan list.
I’ve listened with my Whistler TRX-1 and my Uniden SDS 100. No difference in the dispatch audio on either radio.
Any of you have that same experience or do I have a setting wrong in my radios?

What frequency are you monitoring? They have several listed.
 
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Ah, ok. Good to know, thanks! I'll add that to my scan list and see how much activity is there. I only have what's in the database loaded in my scan lists. Maybe I missed that one, I'll go back and look at the RR database.
 

gman4661

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Yes, they also use 462.9500
Is the UHF freq analog or digital? Not seeing a license. Some time ago, I was told that Gold Cross was using UHF for transports.

I found this interesting:


Looks like Grady was given the boot in favor of Gold Cross.

Also didn't know that Gold Cross was in Greene Co. Never saw them when I was working there. Must be a recent development.
 
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