As great as this sounds. I was told that with our dispatch using CAD and having the enhanced 911 system installed that we couldn't use the alpha numeric paging system. Can anyone tell me if this is true or just dispatch not wanting to add something to there routine? The enhanced 911 has been a great improvement but the MIN IV's still suck!
Our county paging system isn't supporting paging (yet) so we went with an add on. The county dispatcher doesn't do any extra work. when we get the printout the computer that is receiving it at our station in place of the station printer takes over and automatically sends the page and printouts to designated station printers and can send a print for each unit due on the assignment box. (only once we don't have it send multiple pages or the close, all that is done over radio) it also allows us to export the data from the program and then import it into our firehouse software.
A few of our stations do this "export the data from the program and then import it into our firehouse software" too. Very useful for different purposes. I wish we had an off-air decoder as well, but a few of our senior mambers don't see any use for it.
The CAD our dispactch center uses does the alpha paging automatically,and is also sending the call information as text messages and even emailing to the PDA phone's. It just depends on how the individual wants to get the information on the calls, and they also have the E911 system. It sounds like the CAD vendor or the dispatch center doesn't want to mess with it.
The county that I live in has the CAD system and our department uses alpha numeric paging as well as standard paging. I get the messages sent to my cell phone instead of an alpha numeric pager. The neighboring district to mine as well uses alpha numeric paging. To my knowledge there have never been any issues in wanting to get rid of it. I think that it works very well. No there is a slight delay after the initial alarm is sent before you get the message on the alpha numeric pager, but other than that it is great. I think it might be your dispatch and alarm center not wanting to mess with it. Hope that I helped out with your dilema.
Howdy from Santa Barbara, CA... Just thought I'd throw in that most folks out here in my area have scraped the alpha numeric paging all together and have gone 100% cell phone text message verses the pagers. TV's are going digital, everything that I am used to using seems to be constantly changing. It can be frustrating at times but like they say, you can either keep up with the big dogs or curl up in a ball on the porch... or then again, maybe I've totally misunderstood what the alpha numeric paging system is for you guys, maybe it's not a little pager that you clip on your belt that you read when there is a response or maybe it's the MIN IV's that are the small scanner that sends an alert tone if activated by dispatch. Either way, we use portable radios these days and cell phones. The Motorola pagers can no longer be repaired due to no one selling the reads for the internal programming. So fill me in Scamehorn, am I on tract here or should I just go outside and hang with the big dogs? TCSS, Mike
two weeks ago sprint had a national texting outage, if I was sent a text message for a fire then I would have been SoL... there are to many problems with cell phones, to unreliable for me to consider as a means for dispatch, there has been one time I had an issue with my Minitor II and that was during our windstorm in SW Ohio with the 80mph winds from Hurricane Ivan I think it was, I got the tones but nothing after so I responded to station. I have also never seen a problem with my dads Minitor IV? i think it is that is alpha numeric, it beeps when we have a fire detail, gets the address and any addition info. When on station its a great tool for the EMT's to check the address and have a time of dispatch on record