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Tone generator

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Cow

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I have some Minitor V's that I need to test and I don't want to annoy our dispatchers with pager tests. A few years ago I downloaded the free trial ComTekk tone generator software and did it like that, but the free trial does not have that option anymore... Is there any other free software out there that I could use? Thanks
 
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cabletech

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Do you or a friend have access to a commerical service monitor? Just about all monitors have the ablity to generated tones for testing.
 
Kirk

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The free audio software Audacity has the ability to generate tones. It takes some fiddling, but I did it years ago. It's available for most platforms.
 
TheManBornWithin

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Do you have any portable or mobile radios? All the ones I own have the ability to transmit tones.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 4 Beta
 
Avery93

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cabletech said:
Two way radios do not have the ablity to transmit paging type tones like what the OP is looking for.
Click to expand...

That is about the most incorrect post you have made so far, and that's saying something.

I would say a solid majority of Kenwood, Icom, Motorola and Vertex radios made in the last 15 years support 2-Tone encoding.
 
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fdscan

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Yup. My radio was in production from... Like 1995-2005 maybe and it supports tone encoding.

Audacity would be your best bet, but as far as playing them over the air, that's a different story.
 
kruser

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Don't the Minitor's use tones that are near a second long for each tone?
I was not aware that any of the portables could encode a signaling tone of that length before sending the next tone.

I'll admit that I don't know the tone specs on the Minitor's but I would think each tone must be active for a specific amount of time before it is considered valid.

I've played with the various tone settings on some of my Motorola portables in the past but can't recall being able to generate a tone for more than a few milliseconds for each tone. They sure sounded way too fast (short) to trip a Minitor but maybe I'm wrong. Interesting if the portables or mobiles really can be setup to trip a Minitor!
 
Avery93

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kruser said:
Don't the Minitor's use tones that are near a second long for each tone?
I was not aware that any of the portables could encode a signaling tone of that length before sending the next tone.

I'll admit that I don't know the tone specs on the Minitor's but I would think each tone must be active for a specific amount of time before it is considered valid.

I've played with the various tone settings on some of my Motorola portables in the past but can't recall being able to generate a tone for more than a few milliseconds for each tone. They sure sounded way too fast (short) to trip a Minitor but maybe I'm wrong. Interesting if the portables or mobiles really can be setup to trip a Minitor!
Click to expand...

Standard timing for Quick Call II is 1 second / 3 seconds, and 8 seconds for long (group) tones. This is the default encode settings for most radios, and it isn't even adjustable on some Motorola radios (e.g. the Commercial Series).

Not sure why you were unable to get your radios to work correctly. Maybe you were using using the old "tone burst" or single tone format, which was once used for repeater access?
 
kruser

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Avery93 said:
Standard timing for Quick Call II is 1 second / 3 seconds, and 8 seconds for long (group) tones. This is the default encode settings for most radios, and it isn't even adjustable on some Motorola radios (e.g. the Commercial Series).

Not sure why you were unable to get your radios to work correctly. Maybe you were using using the old "tone burst" or single tone format, which was once used for repeater access?
Click to expand...

Thanks for that info.
I'm sure I was messing with something other than two tone. I'll have to look at this again as it has been some time since messing with the signaling formats available.
 
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fdscan

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Yeah I mean that's the easiest way, but couldn't the tone be slightly affected by that? Not sure if the Minitor's that picky/precise.
 
nick1427d

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At my FD we were constantly getting new pagers, swapping out old for new, new frequencies, changing PL tones etc. I used comtekk two tone generator for all the testing.

With comtekk I'd set up my tones, key up the mic (portable, base, mobile, doesn't matter) and hold it next to computer speaker. Worked everytime.

I used a low power portable as well so I wouldn't bother the whole county/dispatcher with tones all day just to make sure a few Minitors worked.

When the trial was up and we were done switching frequencies and what not, we programmed our HT1250s to encode and just used those to test.
 
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