Certain details of fire pager and fire station alerting vary by dispatch center, although the procedure for sending (transmitting) tones is generally the same.
Fire Alerting Frequencies
Four of the nine dispatch centers use the common, county-wide frequency for fire alerting:
- Oxford (1COM)
- Trenton (5COM)
- West Chester (7COM)
- Sheriff (9COM)
The Sheriff center, 9COM, dispatches for fourteen area fire and EMS agencies. Oxford dispatchers for their own fire department and the College Corner fire department. Trenton and West Chester dispatch for their respective fire departments. Miami University (4COM) is also set up to serve as a backup center for the City of Oxford.
Fairfield (3COM), Hamilton (2COM), Middletown (8COM) and Monroe (6COM) each use separate conventional radio systems to perform fire alerting within their cities.
Paging Procedure
Dispatchers use a feature to drop tones on the consoles called “Checklist Page”. The checklist page feature allows you to select the tone or tones you wish to send first, and then choose when to send them.
If you’re sending both fire and EMS to a particular incident, or multiple agencies (i.e. Milford and Somerville together), the dispatcher can pick all the necessary tones and then send them out consecutively.
The first thing you may notice is that tones have a safety lock enabled. They look like this by default:
If the console operator were to accidentally click this button, it would not send the tone with the safety on.
Step One
Click the “CheckList Page” button on the toolbar.
You’ll see the tones have gone from having safety enabled to having the safety removed:
to
Step Two
You can now begin selecting the tones you wish to send by clicking each one a single time. As you select tones, they will turn white.
Note: They will not transmit yet! So, even if the paging channel is busy with traffic from another center, you can start picking out the tones you need to send.
To include the 800MHz dispatch talkgroup for your fire users, include the Alert XX FD button (where XX is the abbreviation for the appropriate talkgroup – e.g. Alert SO FD).
To include the 800MHz dispatch talkgroup for your law enforcement users, include the Alert XX LE button (where XX is the abbreviation for the appropriate talkgroup – e.g. Alert SO LE).
Examples:
For a fire and EMS incident in Morgan Township:
Alert SO LE
Alert SO FD
140 MR FIRE
140 MR EMS
For a fire and EMS incident in Morgan, and you don’t wish to include SO LE MAIN:
Alert SO FD
140 MR FIRE
140 MR EMS
Step Three
When you are ready to send the tones, click the “Send Page” button on the toolbar:
The tones will begin transmitting over all the appropriate channels.
You will key-up with the foot pedal or your headset transmit button while the tones are sending. As each tone finishes, it will display a green checkmark on the tone button. Continue to hold your transmit button or pedal. When all tones finish, begin speaking.