I was a cadet on a local FD starting when I was 16 back in the mid 1970’s, the week I turned 18 I was voted on as a Paid On Call (POC) firefighter. I then had 6 months to finish the Certified Firefighter I (CF-I) level training and test. The training was done in-house, one of our members was a FT lieutenant in the next town that hosted a Fire Academy, incidentally they also had personnel at our station in a shared response agreement between the two suburbs. This lieutenant was the head of the academy and was able to certify our weekly training curriculum. Since I attended the same training during my cadet period I was able to complete the certifications pretty quickly.
I completed the CF-I level, then went to EMT school, then completed the CF-II class, then more Medic school and finally some Rescue Tech courses. All this occurred while I was taking a full class load at the community college and working full time. Thankfully I was able to arrange the schedules to accommodate this and worked my fire shifts on overnights, so I was able to get paid for sleeping. Since it was a quiet town, I slept thru the night more often than not. Being a young guy helped too.
I always had a scanner around of course. Aside from the scanner of the era on the car I always had a handheld. At first of course they were crystal controlled. My main one was a VHF Midland 4-channel that I had all thru high school as well as college and the FD years. It had crystals for our FD, the Mutual Aid channel, the public works channel (which both the police and fire used often) and the neighboring town’s FD that I lived in for part of this time. When I would go to see a girlfriend who lived a few towns north I would swap out a crystal for that FD.
Our FD had mostly Motorola radios in the vehicles at the time. The mobiles were Micors, and I seem to recall a couple Motracs on the older rigs. The oldest vehicle, an early 60’s engine that got downgraded to a squad as it only had a 750GPM pump, had a loud dynamotor whine whenever you transmitted, the lights would dim if at idle as well. Gotta love radios with moving parts and vacuum tubes!
These radios were 4-channel with F1 being Fire Dispatch (154.205), F2 being the Mutual Aid channel called NIFERN at the time (Northern Illinois Fire Emergency Radio Network) on 154.265. This was later extended to the rest of the Midwest and renamed IFERN (Interagency Fire Emergency Radio Network). F3 was the fire channel for the neighboring towns to the west that we had auto-aid with (154.235). F4 was the local PW channel (155.085) that was also used by the FD and especially the PD. These radios all had white mics as we bought them directly thru the state bid process.
The State of Illinois at the time issued thousands of Motorola Motrac’s and later Micors as well as a couple generations of GE radios (Mastr-II were the later ones, Mastr Pro the early ones) in a couple different programs. Police got ISPERN (Illinois State Police Emergency Radio Network) radios with the 154.680 ISPERN frequency (later changed to 155.475 in the late 70’s or early 80’s). These had red mics and an ISPERN escutcheon. They were strapped for scanning Channel 1 (ISPERN) that you were not allowed to disable. Departments could add crystal elements for Channels 2, 3 and 4, most PDs would put their old VHF channels in F2 after they moved off to T-Band (470 MHz.) in the 70’s. Other channels would get their PW or fire channels installed.
EMS providers got similar radios, called “MERCI” (Medical Emergency Radio Communications for Illinois). Our ambulances and rescue squad all had state-issued MERCI radios, complete with yellow mics and dual control heads. These did not have strapped scan and had 155.340 (MERCI340), 155.400 (MERCI400) and 155.280 (MERCI280. We also had in Channel 4 a channel called “State Police” that transmitted on 155.340 and received on 155.460. 155.460 was the state police high band channel most often used for point to point between ISP posts as well as troopers travelling outside their districts (“Itinerant Units” in ISP parlance). While we never once used it to talk to the state police, I would have the radio there so I could listen in when we weren’t running a call.
These MERCI radios also had MPL (Multi-PL) decks as different hospitals would have different PL codes. We had them labeled with the names of the hospitals. We always received in carrier squelch, so we often heard operations from other ambulances.
Our ambulances also had Med radios. These were big, orange-cased Motorola radios that looked and opened like a tackle box. We called them Bio-phones, but I don’t recall if that was the actual name for the radios or if we used it in a generic sense. Soon after I started, they were replaced by a state grant, and we got Apcor radios. These were lighter, easier to carry, and the batteries lasted longer. They had a docking station in the ambulances so they would charge and had external antennas for better coverage. These operated on the 463.000 thru 463.175 MED1 thru MED8 channels and could be used for voice as well as telemetry. We used these for ALS calls and the MERCI VHF radios for BLS calls.
For portables we had mostly 2-channel Motorola HT220’s although we had some of those lunchbox style PT300’s in the older rigs. Radios were expensive then, so we did not have radios for everyone. Each engine had 2 portables assigned to it. One went to the officer and the other to the senior guy on the hose or ladder. I was usually assigned to the ladder truck and rarely got to carry the portable until later in my relatively short career as a fire-medic.
Our FD was dispatched by the bigger town to the south that also had personnel in our station, we then covered portions of both towns with them. We did have a radio room that we could dispatch from if “Arlington” dispatch went down. It was equipped with one of those bread-basket style Motorola based stations from the 60’s as well as a QuickCall encoder. The encoder had 2 columns of square white buttons; I think there were 8 rows and a Send button. You would select one button from each column and send, then do the same for any other tone sets. I recall that the Station 5 code was 12, Station 6 was 32 and the General Tone was 22. The Chief had 42, the Inspectors 52 and Officers 62. I don’t recall the Group they were in however.
Soon after I started that old base set was replaced with a newer 70’s vintage desk set with a rectangular case. It had been used at the Arlington dispatch center but that had been consolidated with the central dispatch center, so they handed down this set to us. I don’t recall if it was a control station connected to a remote transceiver or all-in-one. In the storage room was our old Plectron paging encoder, I wish now I had rescued that along with the alert receivers!
A year before I started as a POC we got new Motorola Minitor pagers. These were the classic squared off case with the large metal reset bar at the top with a grey hard plastic case. We also had the classic white curved amplified chargers. We still had a couple older pre-Minitor pagers, these lacked a monitor function and only had a stand-up charger, no audio amp. Since I was a “radio guy” they let me handle minor repairs and swapping out the Vibrasponders when someone was reassigned to another station. They had recalled the Plectrons as they were now redundant. I was able to rescue some from the trash and really loved the audio quality.
We also had a scanner in the radio room there, an older Bearcat IV, complete with the local VHF police and fire channels. Later, when the police switched to UHF T-Band we got another scanner from Radio Shack with both of our local system channels and some of the neighboring town’s police channels. These were still in use at least until the 1990’s when I last visited the firehouse after I left in the mid-80’s. They were just getting ready to switch police operations to an 800 MHz. trunking system, the FD’s switched to that system a few years later.
Our FD also had a “Command Van”. This was an extended length Ford van with a regular dispatch radio up front and several more in back with a desktop and a couple office chairs. We had to remember to strap those chairs in when not in use, lest they roll around. I don’t recall all the radios in this rig but do remember that there were a couple of 8-channel Micors with MPL decks. We had all the FD channels from Chicago in one, and most of the suburban ones as well. There was also a UHF Micor with some of the local police UHF channels.
The only time I ever recall it being used as anything other than the Chief’s buggy was at the Flight 191 crash near O’Hare. I happened to be close to the firehouse when my pager went out and was the first to arrive at our station, about 9 miles from the crash site. The Chief saw me and said something about me being a dispatcher for my regular job, let’s take the van. We then reported to Staging and was assigned a location to work and coordinated much of the suburban and Chicago communications. He and I were there until well past midnight when we were relieved by a chief and firefighter from another agency. We left our van there and took the other department’s brush truck to their station and then they drove us back to ours, We the got some sleep and relieved the other crew around lunch time the next day and was released that evening.
After I left the FD as I was getting hired on to a different police department, I had to turn in my trusty Minitor. I had carried it for over 5 years, and it never once failed me. I did have the little plug-in antenna adapter for it, connected to a VHF quarter-wave in my car. I positioned the cable so it came up the bottom of the seat so if I forgot to unplug it it would pull out without damage. The external antenna connector was a Sub-Mini headphone style jack IIRC and mounted on the bottom of the pager. This allowed it to be automatically connected to the mating plug in the charger base. With the external antenna connected I could hear our channel from 100 miles away at times.
I did get to keep the Plectrons I rescued from the trash and kept them for a long time. A couple of them eventually made it to Bob Wallace for refurbishing and updating the frequencies and tones. A couple also ended up with my new police department 10 years later as monitors for a couple Fireground channels, of which they excelled. We had to start recording these channels and this was an easy way to get going on that task. They were eventually replaced with Motorola CM300’s. As a side note, these CM300’s turned out to be fantastic monitor receivers for our new 9-1-1 Center, we had about 20 of them eventually for a bunch of fire channels, the new PW UHF system and police auxiliary channels.
I had a great time on the fire department and enjoyed the radio aspect of it immensely, probably even more so than firefighting. I preferred police work however. I did not like to sit around the day room waiting for a call to come in, as a police officer I could go and do my thing rather than wait for it to come to me.
I completed the CF-I level, then went to EMT school, then completed the CF-II class, then more Medic school and finally some Rescue Tech courses. All this occurred while I was taking a full class load at the community college and working full time. Thankfully I was able to arrange the schedules to accommodate this and worked my fire shifts on overnights, so I was able to get paid for sleeping. Since it was a quiet town, I slept thru the night more often than not. Being a young guy helped too.
I always had a scanner around of course. Aside from the scanner of the era on the car I always had a handheld. At first of course they were crystal controlled. My main one was a VHF Midland 4-channel that I had all thru high school as well as college and the FD years. It had crystals for our FD, the Mutual Aid channel, the public works channel (which both the police and fire used often) and the neighboring town’s FD that I lived in for part of this time. When I would go to see a girlfriend who lived a few towns north I would swap out a crystal for that FD.
Our FD had mostly Motorola radios in the vehicles at the time. The mobiles were Micors, and I seem to recall a couple Motracs on the older rigs. The oldest vehicle, an early 60’s engine that got downgraded to a squad as it only had a 750GPM pump, had a loud dynamotor whine whenever you transmitted, the lights would dim if at idle as well. Gotta love radios with moving parts and vacuum tubes!
These radios were 4-channel with F1 being Fire Dispatch (154.205), F2 being the Mutual Aid channel called NIFERN at the time (Northern Illinois Fire Emergency Radio Network) on 154.265. This was later extended to the rest of the Midwest and renamed IFERN (Interagency Fire Emergency Radio Network). F3 was the fire channel for the neighboring towns to the west that we had auto-aid with (154.235). F4 was the local PW channel (155.085) that was also used by the FD and especially the PD. These radios all had white mics as we bought them directly thru the state bid process.
The State of Illinois at the time issued thousands of Motorola Motrac’s and later Micors as well as a couple generations of GE radios (Mastr-II were the later ones, Mastr Pro the early ones) in a couple different programs. Police got ISPERN (Illinois State Police Emergency Radio Network) radios with the 154.680 ISPERN frequency (later changed to 155.475 in the late 70’s or early 80’s). These had red mics and an ISPERN escutcheon. They were strapped for scanning Channel 1 (ISPERN) that you were not allowed to disable. Departments could add crystal elements for Channels 2, 3 and 4, most PDs would put their old VHF channels in F2 after they moved off to T-Band (470 MHz.) in the 70’s. Other channels would get their PW or fire channels installed.
EMS providers got similar radios, called “MERCI” (Medical Emergency Radio Communications for Illinois). Our ambulances and rescue squad all had state-issued MERCI radios, complete with yellow mics and dual control heads. These did not have strapped scan and had 155.340 (MERCI340), 155.400 (MERCI400) and 155.280 (MERCI280. We also had in Channel 4 a channel called “State Police” that transmitted on 155.340 and received on 155.460. 155.460 was the state police high band channel most often used for point to point between ISP posts as well as troopers travelling outside their districts (“Itinerant Units” in ISP parlance). While we never once used it to talk to the state police, I would have the radio there so I could listen in when we weren’t running a call.
These MERCI radios also had MPL (Multi-PL) decks as different hospitals would have different PL codes. We had them labeled with the names of the hospitals. We always received in carrier squelch, so we often heard operations from other ambulances.
Our ambulances also had Med radios. These were big, orange-cased Motorola radios that looked and opened like a tackle box. We called them Bio-phones, but I don’t recall if that was the actual name for the radios or if we used it in a generic sense. Soon after I started, they were replaced by a state grant, and we got Apcor radios. These were lighter, easier to carry, and the batteries lasted longer. They had a docking station in the ambulances so they would charge and had external antennas for better coverage. These operated on the 463.000 thru 463.175 MED1 thru MED8 channels and could be used for voice as well as telemetry. We used these for ALS calls and the MERCI VHF radios for BLS calls.
For portables we had mostly 2-channel Motorola HT220’s although we had some of those lunchbox style PT300’s in the older rigs. Radios were expensive then, so we did not have radios for everyone. Each engine had 2 portables assigned to it. One went to the officer and the other to the senior guy on the hose or ladder. I was usually assigned to the ladder truck and rarely got to carry the portable until later in my relatively short career as a fire-medic.
Our FD was dispatched by the bigger town to the south that also had personnel in our station, we then covered portions of both towns with them. We did have a radio room that we could dispatch from if “Arlington” dispatch went down. It was equipped with one of those bread-basket style Motorola based stations from the 60’s as well as a QuickCall encoder. The encoder had 2 columns of square white buttons; I think there were 8 rows and a Send button. You would select one button from each column and send, then do the same for any other tone sets. I recall that the Station 5 code was 12, Station 6 was 32 and the General Tone was 22. The Chief had 42, the Inspectors 52 and Officers 62. I don’t recall the Group they were in however.
Soon after I started that old base set was replaced with a newer 70’s vintage desk set with a rectangular case. It had been used at the Arlington dispatch center but that had been consolidated with the central dispatch center, so they handed down this set to us. I don’t recall if it was a control station connected to a remote transceiver or all-in-one. In the storage room was our old Plectron paging encoder, I wish now I had rescued that along with the alert receivers!
A year before I started as a POC we got new Motorola Minitor pagers. These were the classic squared off case with the large metal reset bar at the top with a grey hard plastic case. We also had the classic white curved amplified chargers. We still had a couple older pre-Minitor pagers, these lacked a monitor function and only had a stand-up charger, no audio amp. Since I was a “radio guy” they let me handle minor repairs and swapping out the Vibrasponders when someone was reassigned to another station. They had recalled the Plectrons as they were now redundant. I was able to rescue some from the trash and really loved the audio quality.
We also had a scanner in the radio room there, an older Bearcat IV, complete with the local VHF police and fire channels. Later, when the police switched to UHF T-Band we got another scanner from Radio Shack with both of our local system channels and some of the neighboring town’s police channels. These were still in use at least until the 1990’s when I last visited the firehouse after I left in the mid-80’s. They were just getting ready to switch police operations to an 800 MHz. trunking system, the FD’s switched to that system a few years later.
Our FD also had a “Command Van”. This was an extended length Ford van with a regular dispatch radio up front and several more in back with a desktop and a couple office chairs. We had to remember to strap those chairs in when not in use, lest they roll around. I don’t recall all the radios in this rig but do remember that there were a couple of 8-channel Micors with MPL decks. We had all the FD channels from Chicago in one, and most of the suburban ones as well. There was also a UHF Micor with some of the local police UHF channels.
The only time I ever recall it being used as anything other than the Chief’s buggy was at the Flight 191 crash near O’Hare. I happened to be close to the firehouse when my pager went out and was the first to arrive at our station, about 9 miles from the crash site. The Chief saw me and said something about me being a dispatcher for my regular job, let’s take the van. We then reported to Staging and was assigned a location to work and coordinated much of the suburban and Chicago communications. He and I were there until well past midnight when we were relieved by a chief and firefighter from another agency. We left our van there and took the other department’s brush truck to their station and then they drove us back to ours, We the got some sleep and relieved the other crew around lunch time the next day and was released that evening.
After I left the FD as I was getting hired on to a different police department, I had to turn in my trusty Minitor. I had carried it for over 5 years, and it never once failed me. I did have the little plug-in antenna adapter for it, connected to a VHF quarter-wave in my car. I positioned the cable so it came up the bottom of the seat so if I forgot to unplug it it would pull out without damage. The external antenna connector was a Sub-Mini headphone style jack IIRC and mounted on the bottom of the pager. This allowed it to be automatically connected to the mating plug in the charger base. With the external antenna connected I could hear our channel from 100 miles away at times.
I did get to keep the Plectrons I rescued from the trash and kept them for a long time. A couple of them eventually made it to Bob Wallace for refurbishing and updating the frequencies and tones. A couple also ended up with my new police department 10 years later as monitors for a couple Fireground channels, of which they excelled. We had to start recording these channels and this was an easy way to get going on that task. They were eventually replaced with Motorola CM300’s. As a side note, these CM300’s turned out to be fantastic monitor receivers for our new 9-1-1 Center, we had about 20 of them eventually for a bunch of fire channels, the new PW UHF system and police auxiliary channels.
I had a great time on the fire department and enjoyed the radio aspect of it immensely, probably even more so than firefighting. I preferred police work however. I did not like to sit around the day room waiting for a call to come in, as a police officer I could go and do my thing rather than wait for it to come to me.
