I like this idea, except that we can't set up 10 of these or however many places we might be staying at night. It also doesn't help with needing things quiet when we are at formal events.
You can overcome these obstacles. The beauty of the decoders is that they're cheap (less than $100 each) and will work with any radio (including a scanner); if you need it silent during an event, just turn off the decoder output completely so that no audio goes to the PA at all. Similar decoders have even been designed and built by ham radio operators using PIC processors, with a total parts cost of about $25 per unit.
Taking this to the next logical step, could we set this up in the truck, and then use a lower power transmitter to transmit over a frequency which our pagers could be tuned to? So use steps 1-3 from above, but instead of connecting to a PA system, connect to a radio transmitter and have that transmit to pagers/radio carried on the body? I don't know how reliable a radio transmitter mounted in the truck would be. And the cost of leaving the truck running to give the system juice might negate any savings we get from it.
This also could be done, and has been done in the past (at least, installing a paging encoder in a vehicle... Plectron used to make one); however, you're starting to make it more complicated. On top of that, an additional transmitter would be more costly .
We did verify already that Locution can dispatch tones before the message, but that's where we stopped after we realized the tones were worthless.
I know that at the firehouses in the metro area, they do have a box installed (which I hear costs about 9k) which is how they get dispatches from locution. It does not come over the radio channel. We know this because the radio channel can only dispatch one run at a time, whereas the locution system can do up to 7. When it's busier, we will hear the dispatch in our station, get in the truck, and as we are responding, hear the dispatch again over the radio. Does this sound like Site Lens?
That's not Site Lens, which has nothing to do with Locution. Site Lens (like SIMS, SystemWatch and SIP) is an advanced trunked system monitoring tool for Motorola systems. While triggering is one of the available options, it is far, far more than simply a tool for sending messages and call alerts. It's actually a pretty advanced tool for trunked system configuration, diagnostics and monitoring, and allows such useful features as statistics reporting, subscriber air time reporting, and so forth. You usually only see these terminals co-located with the trunked system controller, or in the radio shop where the system is maintained.
In addition, all of those products (SiteLens, SIMS, SIP and SystemWatch) are all being or have been discontinued by Motorola; the approved product is now Genwatch, which takes over the functions of all the above. Any of these solutions are major overkill for what you're trying to do, and would be very, very costly.
Locution is network based; it can send so many runs to the houses at once because they're going over the network; this is why you might often hear companies responding before the run has even gone out over the air.
If you have 10 fire stations, and each one already has a trunked radio in place, paging decoders are probably your best (and least costly) option; assuming you have a service shop with radio techs who know what they're doing, your total parts outlay would probably be $1000 or less for all 10 stations.
