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Permalink Reply by John Riley on July 26, 2012 at 1:43am

Who's name is listed on this frequency license? You stated there is not much fire-ems usage, do you share this frequency with others (region wide) that you may interrupt communications? 

There should not be any problems announcing "informational pages" such as meetings, training/work sessions, duty crews/assignments, apparatus availability, road closures, water supply disruptions, hospital bed limits, etc. 

My first suggestion for you is to go up the chain-of-command (depending on your setup), Departmental Officers, Dispatch Center Supervisors, Emergency Service Coordinator, etc.

There may be a reason(s) why your communication center doesn't offer this, Past abuse? Lack of desire to start paging non-emergency announcements? 

With a system like you described (low volume usage), informational paging such as daily tests can, at the very least, ensure proper working equipment, and provide emergency service providers valuable information regarding some of the items I mentioned above.

I may not be as familiar with several happenings with my 2nd and 3rd (even my own First Due) out response coverage area, however, our 'Special Message Page' can provide responders timely and valuable information prior to an actual alarm.

Good Luck... and be safe!

    

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Permalink Reply by Bull on July 26, 2012 at 12:01pm

Not sure of the name, but I would assume its our county Em Gov. We do not share this with other counties, except to communicate with incoming units from other counties. Years ago we were doing our own informational pages, but our Em Govt Coord. stated the FCC does not allow this. The sheriff back then stated we should have dispatch do them. So......thats what we have been doing, and now all of a sudden, the Em Govt Coord, stated that dispatch may not be allowed to do informational pages anymore, because she believes the FCC dont allow it. They are suppose to do a weekly test every Thurs, but....sometimes we go a month or better. Twice now in the last 2 months, the repeater went down, and nobody knew it until dispatch was trying to page EMS. Which of course turned into a cluster....as you can imagine. Thanks for the info, I hope this helps with your questions, to help me.

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Permalink Reply by Russ Gregston on July 29, 2012 at 12:16pm

 We currently have a 800 number I call for informational pages it's completely automated and is set up with our area page tones I have a 10 sec message window and it is completely separate from the dispatch center.

But in our case the state carries the FCC license. Also it serves as a back up in case the normal dispatch routing is interrupted. My response area is in a rural part of the state with the dispatch center nearly 200 miles away which relies on a series of repeaters, so on more the one occasion the back up has been used.

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