Alpha paging and the Volunteer Fire/EMS service

[WB2IID]

Does anyone have any opinion or - better yet - experience with alphanumeric pagers as a primary means of activation in the volunteer fire/EMS service?

I heard someone propose alpha paging as a replacement for the traditional tone/voice pager systems many of us use now. I have trouble seeing how one would:
- be awakened in the middle of the night by a chirp or a vibrating thing on the night stand
- read an alpha display while trying to get into or drive a car
- receive updates on the incident without having to actually read about it

I also don't think many of the alpha pagers are robust enough to survive dunking in a portable pond or just being inside your hot, sweaty turnout suit. I do carry a Moto Advisor Gold in addition to my FD Minitor 5, and I'm on my 3rd or 4th Advisor in three years.

Joe

[The Pager Geek]

http://www.critresp.com/

Specificly the M1501. It'll survive a portable pond swim.. etc.

GREAT system, and lots of expansion capabilty on the same system. (AVL, MDT, Station Controls, CAD interface...)

tpg

[FDC_100]

We use the alpha page as a back up to the voice and so you don't have to ask for a repeat of the address or cross street, however you are a the mercy of the commercial carrier (verizon, nextel, sprint etc.) and many times the text message is delayed any you may not receive the message until after the alarm. It is nice when you are out of town and your kept up to speed on what's going on back home.

[alex]

We use the alpha page as a back up to the voice and so you don't have to ask for a repeat of the address or cross street, however you are a the mercy of the commercial carrier (verizon, nextel, sprint etc.) and many times the text message is delayed any you may not receive the message until after the alarm. It is nice when you are out of town and your kept up to speed on what's going on back home.

When it comes to primary alerting with the alpha paging requirement - I would strongly recommend having your own infrastructure, and not using someone else's. I don't know if the system TPG mentions can work on top of or piggy back, but I know the system he's speaking of that's setup... I think it's a 29rx/27tx 900mhz reflex system, that is built and county owned to support their people. The units I've seen are pretty decent, and loud. Those pagers are no "advisor" pagers.

It's my understanding, and only through word of mouth, that they have a couple different things setup on that system to ensure that the pages make it to the pagers in a shortened period of time. I don't know the tech behind it, but the fact that the system isn't pushing out a few million pages a day probably has something to do with it.

-Alex

[spareparts]

When it comes to primary alerting with the alpha paging requirement - I would strongly recommend having your own infrastructure, and not using someone else's.

I'm going echo Alex's comments. The facility I work at uses USA Mobility for long distance. We were using them for in-house until I took a hard look at the time lag between the modem and it hitting the pagers. This is with their TX on our Roof!

We recently turned up a VHF Alphanumeric system. Lag of less then 10 seconds between hitting the "send" button and the pager going off .

PS - You may want to look at the relevant ISO ratings guide. I'm pretty sure you need to own the paging infrastructure, otherwise your ratings take a hit.

[yardbirdjr]

I agree with having your own system for alpha paging. Keep the voice paging as well.

The rescue squad I belong to has both voice pagers and alpha pagers. Well the voice pagers work fairly well, but there is sometime a long pause between the voice dispatch and the alpha dispatch.

We are currently using usamobility as our alph provider. Our communications director has talked about installing a county/citywide alph paging system, but that has sort of been put on the back burner becase of the rebanding.

Like I said, stick with the voice pagers or look at setting up your own alph paging system.

David

[mr.syntrx]

New South Wales Rural Fire Service and State Emergency Service (largest fire service and second largest rescue providers in the world, respectively, all volunteer) have used alpha paging for callouts for about fifteen years now, with no problems at all. Both agencies run their own VHF POCSAG systems statewide. Voice pagers are really only common in North America nowadays, with most agencies here, in Europe, Africa and Asia using alphanumeric systems.

An Advisor II going "beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep" at full volume will wake most people up with no trouble. The messages are very short, e.g. "xxx SOME ST CROSS MAIN ST MVA PERSONS TRAPPED T/LDR CONTACT VKG 6928xxxx", so trying to read them while getting into car etc isn't much of a problem - it would take me about 10 seconds to read the message above. Updates to the job such as cancellations are broadcast over the pager, and these messages are equally short, so I don't see how reading them would me much of a problem.

Some paging providers have services specially for emergency services, doctors etc, with an SLA stating that a message will be broadcast within xx seconds of the call being received, with priority given above all other traffic. A private alphanumeric paging system isn't all that expensive to set up if you choose to go down that route, either.