Volunteer alerting

[5inchLDH]

Just wondering how people are alerted. My FD uses alpha pagers, but I know people are also still using voice pagers, also.

Which do you use, and which do you prefer?

[ENGINEDUDELT]

Did I miss something or did you forgot the ever reliable HOUSE SIREN. Damn I love that sound, especially at 0300 in the morning, or when I am 25 foot up in a tree, on top the mountain deer hunting. Glad I run enough at work so I don't get that bushy tail going.........LOL

[Amon]

Sirens are cool. Some squads in my area still have them. Probably makes visitors crap their pants when they hear them! We have basic pager/monitors. Using a VHF system which has problems penetrating buildings. I can't hear the tones in my office but, can hear them in the john. Must be the water in the pipes! :o

[engine113]

House sirens are nice. I can definetly say that a few times when I haven't heard the pager at 3am they have saved my tail. Hate to say AACO doesn't have anymore.....

[Smell My Coat !]

Here's one I can't pass up ! Use the pageing system now. BUT! On a personal note I agree with the other guys on the house siren. Had a 25 horse power motor and 12 horns (6 in one row, 6 in another row) around the motor. You could hear that goddamned thing for miles ! ENGINEDUDELT: been up that tree, been there at three in the morning too. And I tell you what used to get me stiff was when the guys marked up from the station and you could hear the siren through the radio in the background.


.......ahhhhh, the good ole days.

[Smell My Coat !]

Does anyone remember the "ringdown" system ? That was a little before my time, but, I do remember my mother and father using it.

For anyone who is not familiar or maybe interested here it is.

Every member of the fire department was provided with a list of names of other members' phone numbers who they were responsible for. When a fire was reported: whoever got the first call had to, in return, call everybody on his list BEFORE going to the firehouse. I think the numbers were only called once by the fire fighter or his wife would keep calling while the firefighter went to the fire. ANYWAY! those members would in turn, call other members on their list, and so on and so on.

Remember that shampoo commercial back in the 70's?
"they'll tell two friends, and so on and so on" sort of like that.

No wonder there were so many big fires back then! Pretty hefty delay would'nt you say? But, in a way pretty interesting.

Still miss that house siren. Damned thing used to scare the hell out of me when I would be there with my father. Before radio alerting (which once installed would set off the siren) before radios, we knew we had a call because the lights would dim, anything electrical would pause for a second or two and a loud "click" would preceed the low drumming of the siren winding up. Shit! by then we were pulling out the door waiting to see which way to turn. I bet it took a good 30 seconds or more for that thing to wind up to a full cycle.

You guys are getting me all misty eyed now. I'm going to bed. :o

[Fireduck]

I remember my dad & grandfather telling me about the ring down system of calling each other pertaining to firecalls.

[emtred]

In Western Maryland where I run at Eastern Garrett we have a house siren and alpha pagers. At Frostburg we have Alpha pagers. At Middle River in Balt. Co. we have a house siren and the Minitors. They don't want to switch to the alpha pagers. I personaly like the alpha pagers best of all. But I love hearing the siren go off.

[thefrmn78]

I guess I am lucky to have a little bit of the voice pager and siren. When I was growing up, (my dad was on the FD and used the voice? pager) we had a siren at the top of the hill I lived on. Luckily for me, I was a heavy sleeper and did not wake up to it. Hell one time we had a structure fire right across the street and I slept through the alarm. It does however bring back memories with the siren, but where I live now, it is useless using a system like that considering the closest person that lives at the FH is 1/4 a mile away.

[quick bar]

With the rising noise concerns by the public. Alot of counties are opting for pagers andd getting rid of the house sirens. But i know that the public bitches about sirens on apparatus. So guess whats probubly next. LOL.

[ashfire]

When I first joined in 1973, there was the house siren, Plectron alert radios and the telephone ring system where when the siren blew the telephone line was connected to it and it went out to member's homes where they had a buzzer or phone bell connected to it.
Later voice pagers came in but a problem when you try to listen to the message a pager tone would interrupt if it was a major call out.
The sirens were taken out of the alerting system through dispatch but can be set off by station personnel if they want to use it has a warning device. Alpha pagers and computer print outs in the station for the on duty crew.
We had a system for members who didn't get a FD alpha pager that when a print out came out there was a computer redial in the station for those who had their own alpha pagers like Breaking News Network.

[somefireguy]

Our station uses both alpha and the minitors. The minitors are nice the damn alphas only work half of the time or the message is scrambled. Our station also has a house siren it runs only during the day though. neighbors complained to much about it at night. oh well what are you going to do. can't piss off the income.

[38-3]

We use the voice paging system. I believe all of the departments in the county use Minitor II, III, and IV pagers. Most still use the sirens too. My department unhooked it after a few years ago when it got stuck for like 3 hours from 3am till 6 am.

[ohfrmn89]

our dept uses both minitor2's and alpha pagers. we used to have a house siren also but that was abandoned when we moved into new firehouse after merger with neighboring dept. only problem with alpha mates is they're owned by the county who does the dispatching, is they are limited range. our old dept used them basically for alerting members for upcoming drills, meetings etc. they were pretty much good throughout the whole state. i like the minitors at night when asleep because i never hear the alpha pager beep in the middle of the night. if it was up to that only i'd be S.O.L. the alpha pagers are nice if you're at work at another job you don't have to worry about the minitor beeping and scaring your fellow employees or bothering your boss. 1 question though i noticed there was 1 vote in poll about e-mails????

[SPREADER64]

Our department has graduated to Alpha Pagers recently and they work fine. However there's nothing like the good old Siren going off in the middle of the night to get your blood circulating. We also have the Voice pagers too.

[Resq19]

I'm part of a Career Staff with in a Volunteer House......We don't get the neat gagets that most of the Volunteers have.....Alpha Pagers we have but usually don't work until 3-4 Minutes after an initial dispatch.

We use the Good 'ol House Klaxton which is wired to the Phone Line from our Communications Center. They usually call us before dropping the Tones to see if a full crew is in house. They still blow the siren....{Or Toot the Hoot I say }
for all reported structure boxes and MVC Incidents.

Klaxton/Siren is an especially rude awakening when I'm napping in the Recliner {Typical Paid Guy :D }

[Dex133]

House Sirens are ok, but Firefighters need to learn that you can't key up a radio when you are standing underneath the damn things when you are trying to talk to your dispatcher. All the dispatcher hears is the siren, and being on the recieving end of a siren thru a radio being piped into my ear thru a headset, it's not a pleasurable thing.

On a side note, try not to stick the friggin mic out of the window when going emergency to a call. The Q has the same effect as a house siren on a dispatcher. Better yet, keep the windows up!

Btw...not to get off the subject but my FD uses Minitors and Alpha-paging, the drawback to the Apha-paging is that sometimes you get the call before the minitor goes off, sometime you get it several hours after the call. Very unreliable system.

[croydonff60]

our department uses voice pagers and the good old house Siern.

[DFDWalkie104]

Our department uses voice pagers. 1 of the stations has the house siren that is activated by a radio tone. We're looking at putting the old house siren back on my station. Can't wait. :D

[5inchLDH]

1 question though i noticed there was 1 vote in poll about e-mails????

Yeah, that was mine. We're alerted over a lowband paging channel, which is simulcast (voice only) over our main channel 1. I don't have a Minitor pager (most of our stuff is either M1 or M2, no M3s or above that I know of). Our internal CAD paging system sends the calls to me by alpha pager and, if it's a box, to my cell phone and e-mail (comes in handy for reference when I'm writing the story for the web site and/or on here). I also get it on my county CAD pager, which sometimes gives me a nice heads up...it just went off for alarm bells, and my departmental CAD pager hasn't yet. Sometimes the delay is up to 2 or 3 minutes!

We also just installed new paging software on our watch desk computer, which allows us to send to various cell phones, e-mails, as well as our core Arch pagers, all over the internet. No more dialup! MUCH faster, and, dare I say, it seems more reliable, at least thus far.

[TORH]

We also use voice pageing. Some brainiac a few years ago decided to get away from using the MINITOR 2 pager and bought the entire county the NOVA pagers. The NOVA's are nice because they are small and light and they make an ok paperweight. But that is about it - if you drop them they will never work right again, the lcd screens burn out after a very short time, if they even look at water they will never work right, etc. :mad: We got tired of all the b.s. problems and sending out ever 3 months for repairs, we went out and bought MINITOR 5. I'm not 100% convince this thing is all it cracked up to be either. :confused: I wish I had my MINITOR 2 back, I'm still convinced that thing was indistrucable. :D

[stormgod]

I can remember waaaaaaaay back in my area, that if you needed the local VFD, you called the hardware store across the street from the station and THEY would sound the siren. I think that was in the early 60s.

[MFD127Coastie]

Well back in the day my granfather and my uncle had the plectrons, the big boxes, damn those things were loud during the night and then the minitor 1's and then so on, i prefer voice pager over alpha-pager because usually it takes a while, especially if your dept. is running off the CAD and using that out to the alphapager, which usually takes about 2-3 minutes which a voice pager only takes a couple of seconds and quicker, Also i love the sirens my gran pop and uncle's dept., Midland Park, NJ they have a siren at the station and then a horn system at the police dept. which are actually high powered train horns about 6 or 8 can't remember and it's cool because it has a nice pattern with the sire like the siren would whine up and then as it whine down there would be a silent pause for like 10 seconds and thats when the horns kick on between the pause and then so on for like 2-3 minutes, But yeah, it's pretty neat, i live up in Orange County, NY where the OC Choppers are and we use voice pagers and sirens, we have the two-tone which when we have a alarm they sound a two-tone for our pagers and then the two-tone for our siren which also tell us there an alarm when they put out our siren tone. But yeah there also a new system out that a firefighter made which is where they set up a server like system i guess over a server or computer and when the tones trip the server starts recording the dispatch message and with in 3 seconds after the message it sends it out to the members who have the account with e-dispatch and it provides them with a number and then you call and actually here what the call or message was, and also the chief can go online when there is a drill or something and write out the message and it sends it to the members or a certain person he selects and the service does every phone service there is, i'll tell ya it pretty nice and the remarks about the system is so positive that the sales are hitting like crazy for this system. I mean member can't complan now that the tones never tripped there pager or that they were out of the area so they did'nt know important messages and you can be anywhere in the state, country or foriegn and still get alerted for what your company goes out to. But yeah really great system and it even has a call log so you can look back on what the past messages were. Heres the site http://www2.edispatches.com

[Flashingover]

Our dept. has all Minitor IV's... some of our neighboring dept.'s have the old II's mixed in with the IV's.

[firemedic78]

Currently we use both the UHF voice two tone paging system with our Minitor 2 thru 5's and also the house siren that sets on top of the roof....The siren blows from 6am to 10pm. Dunno how they came about getting those times, I know when I was younger( I followed dad's footsteps, as many of us have and grew up with the FD) they would blow the siren 24/7 but as some of you mentioned already, some of the citizens who wern't firefighters and didn't know a thing about trying to save someone's life nor even cared, complained about it going off at 2 or 3 am so the city concil passed an ordinance that from 10p-6a county dispatch were not to set off the fire siren, only the storm sirens if warnings permitted, but after 6a and until 10p it was free to blow(pardon the pun, lol). As stated, our Co. dispatch would set off our 2 tone pager tones, then followed by our 2 tone fire siren tone(sometimes they would get it confused for some reason and accidentally set off the siren tone first, and thinking they set off the pager tone, would then start giving the dispatch out, hince us not getting the call, just hearing the siren go off and knowing "oops, they did it again" and we would just automatically start heading to the station....Usually it only took about a block ot two before an officer got on the radio and told them to "re-trip" the tones, that they tripped the wrong tones and they would end up then getting it right....Only thing is, by habbit, they would end up return setting off the siren tone afterwards again, making some people frustrated....Co. also trips our storm siren, as with all county storm sirens....Same thing...2 tone system. We also have the capabilities to trip both sirens off at our FD house. We can do it 2 ways....Either the old fashion way and just hit the button on the breaker box( fire siren on roof) or at the control box(storm siren on pole bhind FD), or we also have an encoder in the watch room that has the capabilities to set off our pager/siren tones. With that encoder, we also have the capabilities to set off any other Co. dept's tones, either pagers or sirens.....A few years ago a Co. communications committee was estabolished, with members from each dept in the Co. on it, basically so we could get grabts for communications and estabolish some sort of SOG's for commuications, and it was agreed that there were to be 2 alt locations chosed geographically throughout the Co, that could operate as a tmep dispatch center and handle 911 calls and tone out depts in the case of an incident at dispatch, or tornado or something wiping out power or whatever, and we were one of those depts chosen, and with the grant we were approved for, the state paid for everything....On a side note, we also recieved a grant that each year we get to put in an order for communications equipment, so once a year we get new radios/pagers, ect.....which is very nice. Now, the good ole days.....and I can remember this like it was yesterday....We had something similar to what someone brought up called the "ringdown" system....but ours was called the "fire phone". What would happen is if there was a ifre, the caller would call the fire number(way before 911 came into place) and then the selected fireman who had a fire phone(usually the chief, asst chief, capt. and 3 firefighters chosen by the chief) would recieve the call just as if someone were calling them like normal. It was a special phone(red) that had 2 buttons on it....After recieving the call(you would always have a paper and pencil next to the phone) they would hit the green button and it would activate the plectrons, and then they would hit the red button and set the siren off.....then you would just respond to the station and then learn what and where the call was.......