In House Alerting System

[hatr1k 6]

What do you guys think of this? useful? practical? worth the $?

[Plectron 1]

I think it's a good idea, I have had people miss alarms while sitting in the firehouse watching TV, and did'nt have their pagers on/with them. They only came upstairs when they heard the trucks start up and had a puzzeled look on their face. If your in the firehouse, why should you wear your pager?? There should be all sorts of lights and alarms going off when a call comes in.

[PVFD113 6]

Simple solution--the Informer by Federal Signal. Around the same price as a pager but can do so much more. Has battery back up, multiple tone capable, relay outputs for strobe or siren activation, variable audio output to feed a PA system, 4 or so different audible warning tones, geez what else--we have one in each station and they work great!!

[CHIEFPHIL 90]

In house systems are good and worth the money. In my station, we are in a dead spot, no cell service and pagers will not open up. During daytime hours, the siren will go off - only if the dispatcher hits the tones. So once we are in the station we need to rely on the inhouse paging system.

we are in the middel of going from low band to UHF with satilite receivers and the like, so hopefully that will solve some of most of our problems. Hopefully it will help us in the station.

[mfc2257 464]

In house systems are great.... The one that I'm familiar with (don't recall the name but I can get it) will allow the scanner or radio to broadcast at a reduced volume in the entire facility 24hrs per day. Seperate volume controls are installed into each sound "sensative" room such as the chief's office and a meeting room should the chatter on the scanner need to be eliminated during a meeting or phone call. All of this is secondary to a total system override that occurs when a minitor (or multiple if you have different tones for ems/fire or if you run with multiple counties etc) that is attached to the system is tripped. The when the tones drop the minitor sends the entire system (regardless of whether or not you've turned down the volume in a room or not) to full volume and overrides any other channel talk or scanner signal that might have been broadcasting through the building at that time so that the dispatch can't be interfered with by either the scanner or the secondary fire channels that are used on base radio in the station. Full volume on the system is maintained for a period of 10 minutes as well as all the exterior doors to the apparatus bay unlock for 10 minutes so any members who left a key at home etc, may enter the building during the response. After 10 minutes has elapsed, the volume returns to the original settings in the building, and the apparatus bay doors re lock themselves.

[tbendick 27]

I installed two simple systems for this. One was just a pager wired into a Phone Systems PA function which was already installed in the firehouse.

Second system was using a Motorola CDM radio setup as a base and programed to work like a Pager. When need the radio could be changed to a second channel and work like a base radio and has the ablitiy to also send tones. The radio was wired to a small AMP and then feed threw the building using the phone lines.

[ems-buff 81]

wait you mean to tell me that not all fire house have an in house pageing sytem? how is that possable #-o #-o #-o ](*,) ](*,) ](*,)

[hatr1k 6]

No not all houses have these systems. Apparently its even harder to retrofit a station for one of these things not because of the structure, but because of politics.