Over the last week or two, I have been logging the fire tone-outs for CalFire in Southwestern Riverside County California, and I have found quite a bit of variation in what my scanner was decoding as the fire tone-out frequency.
Looking at just one of the tones decoded
What has been published (by the now offline scanriverside) as using a tone of 1092.4 has been decoded by my scanner and the ProScan software tone-out logger as ranging anywhere from 1086.9hz to 1101.7hz with 48 distinct tone-out frequencies decoded within that range for what should be one exact tone. Notice that the published tone of 1092.4 was not the most decoded tone in the range.
Given the Tone-Out Standby Mode limit of 10 (my my BC-996T) I'm guessing that this would lead to the scanner's Fire Tone-Out mode would fail to alert on most of the dispatches based on the variation of the tones decoded. There could be literally hundreds of combinations for each set of Tone-Out pairs needed to alert for just one fire station. Based on the data, if the scanner was in Tone-Out standby mode, it would have only alerted on only 2 of the 57 dispatched calls due to the variations which is exacerbated because two tones are needed to be properly decoded for a tone-out alert to occur.
Has anyone else seen or experienced this as well?
Are other scanners able to better handle Fire Tone-Out Alerts?
I think being able to set the center frequency of the tone, and a variance allowance (or even range for each fire tone) would significantly reduce the missed alerts, and would be a great feature to have on the scanner. I know they are not going to update the BC-996XT, but are other scanners able to handle this better?
Interesting enough the range of the tones for any given "Base" tone increases with the frequency of the intended tone
Looking at just one of the tones decoded
What has been published (by the now offline scanriverside) as using a tone of 1092.4 has been decoded by my scanner and the ProScan software tone-out logger as ranging anywhere from 1086.9hz to 1101.7hz with 48 distinct tone-out frequencies decoded within that range for what should be one exact tone. Notice that the published tone of 1092.4 was not the most decoded tone in the range.
Given the Tone-Out Standby Mode limit of 10 (my my BC-996T) I'm guessing that this would lead to the scanner's Fire Tone-Out mode would fail to alert on most of the dispatches based on the variation of the tones decoded. There could be literally hundreds of combinations for each set of Tone-Out pairs needed to alert for just one fire station. Based on the data, if the scanner was in Tone-Out standby mode, it would have only alerted on only 2 of the 57 dispatched calls due to the variations which is exacerbated because two tones are needed to be properly decoded for a tone-out alert to occur.
Has anyone else seen or experienced this as well?
Are other scanners able to better handle Fire Tone-Out Alerts?
I think being able to set the center frequency of the tone, and a variance allowance (or even range for each fire tone) would significantly reduce the missed alerts, and would be a great feature to have on the scanner. I know they are not going to update the BC-996XT, but are other scanners able to handle this better?
Interesting enough the range of the tones for any given "Base" tone increases with the frequency of the intended tone
| Tone Group | Sum of Hits | Min of Tone | Max of Tone | StdDev of Tone | Width of Range |
| 339 | 37 | 337.5 | 341.3 | 1.0 | 3.80 |
| 470 | 27 | 469.6 | 471.2 | 0.5 | 1.60 |
| 471 | 6 | 469.9 | 470.6 | 0.4 | 0.70 |
| 554 | 44 | 551.3 | 555.0 | 0.9 | 3.70 |
| 585 | 125 | 583.3 | 586.6 | 0.7 | 3.30 |
| 617 | 140 | 614.2 | 621.2 | 1.2 | 7.00 |
| 652 | 17 | 649.7 | 655.0 | 2.0 | 5.30 |
| 688 | 197 | 686.4 | 689.7 | 0.7 | 3.30 |
| 695 | 2 | 694.1 | 694.1 | #DIV/0! | - |
| 727 | 128 | 724.3 | 729.9 | 1.1 | 5.60 |
| 767 | 37 | 766.5 | 767.9 | 0.5 | 1.40 |
| 810 | 25 | 808.2 | 813.7 | 1.4 | 5.50 |
| 855 | 23 | 854.5 | 858.3 | 1.1 | 3.80 |
| 903 | 111 | 899.8 | 905.5 | 1.2 | 5.70 |
| 1000 | 82 | 996.4 | 1,007.0 | 2.0 | 10.60 |
| 1093 | 228 | 1,086.9 | 1,101.7 | 1.9 | 14.80 |
| 1123 | 164 | 1,118.4 | 1,129.2 | 1.9 | 10.80 |
| 1153 | 248 | 1,141.3 | 1,160.0 | 2.1 | 18.70 |
| 1185 | 283 | 1,181.3 | 1,193.3 | 1.8 | 12.00 |
| 1218 | 199 | 1,211.9 | 1,224.5 | 2.0 | 12.60 |
| 1253 | 164 | 1,248.1 | 1,267.2 | 2.7 | 19.10 |
| 1286 | 710 | 1,276.1 | 1,297.4 | 2.1 | 21.30 |
| 1323 | 238 | 1,310.0 | 1,331.1 | 3.0 | 21.10 |
| 1357 | 337 | 1,348.5 | 1,365.0 | 2.1 | 16.50 |
| 1396 | 352 | 1,388.7 | 1,405.3 | 2.6 | 16.60 |
| 1433 | 368 | 1,425.1 | 1,440.9 | 2.1 | 15.80 |
