York County Fire Dispatch Paging method?

[GSP425]

Hey all, I am stuck in an interesting situation here. I do some work on the outdoor warning sirens across the Upstate, and I was recently asked about hooking up a siren at a Volunteer Fire Department to the paging system. No problem right? Surely fire dispatch is VHF/UHF, program FD tones into my Programmable Logic Controller, and call it a day right?

How wrong I was. First off, York County has its pager system on an (assuming trunked here) 900 MHZ frequency (929.2625). (This might be a simulcast?) Ok, that's a pain in the ass but I have the contact for the PSC Director, I can shoot him an email and get it patched into the system to receive tones right?

Turns out, some of the departments might be using talk group paging. Listening on Broadcastify, I heard a 3-4 second 1000 for an EMS call. Listened for about a half hour more, but didn't hear any tones for fire departments but WAS heard dispatch call-out locations for fire departments, so they were getting paged in some capacity. This would sort of make sense that the 900 MHZ frequency is probably the pager tones, but I don't have a scanner that can scan that high at the moment, so before I reach out to the PSC or the Chief I figured I'd probably better ask here. Ideally, I'd like a Fire tone and a Tornado tone, but none of that can happen easily if it is Talk Group. If it is, have to make some modifications.


If anyone has any up-to-date information on how FDs are paged and if my suspicion is that they are still Two Tone paged is correct, please let me know.

 

[kf8yk]

I would assume that the 900 MHz frequency actually uses POCSAG and/or Flex digital paging protocols.

I think something like this is what you need:

Telemetry Archives - Digital Paging Company

www.apollopagers.com

or

Paging Data Receiver PDR3000 | Message Monitoring & Printing - WiPath

PDR3000 Paging Data Receiver - multi-function paging data receiver/off air decoder/pager receives paged messages and processes them in a variety of ways.

wipathcommunications.com

 

[GSP425]

I would assume that the 900 MHz frequency actually uses POCSAG and/or Flex digital paging protocols.

I think something like this is what you need:

Telemetry Archives - Digital Paging Company

www.apollopagers.com

or

Paging Data Receiver PDR3000 | Message Monitoring & Printing - WiPath

PDR3000 Paging Data Receiver - multi-function paging data receiver/off air decoder/pager receives paged messages and processes them in a variety of ways.

wipathcommunications.com

My PLC will actually do POCSAG and Digital I *think*, but that is also helpful.

 

[YorkCoPublicSafetyComms]

GSP425,

929.2625MHz is simulcasted amongst the 9 paging transmitter sites. However, it is not trunked. We utilize 1200 baud POCSAG for message delivery to the wearable pagers. We do not "page," per se, over the the trunked system from an audible standpoint. We do, however, use call alerts on the 800MHz trunking system for station alerting which only exist on the control channel.

 

[GSP425]

GSP425,

929.2625MHz is simulcasted amongst the 9 paging transmitter sites. However, it is not trunked. We utilize 1200 baud POCSAG for message delivery to the wearable pagers. We do not "page," per se, over the trunked system from an audible standpoint. We do, however, use call alerts on the 800MHz trunking system for station alerting which only exist on the control channel.

Got it, my suspicion was correct in that my thoughts were it was a simulcast. Going to have to make some interesting modifications here, as the PLC only natively supports a 512-baud message.