Motorola Quik Call II Questions

Jim1348 · Post by **Jim1348** » Wed Jan 25, 2012 7:51 pm

I don't have a lot of Motorola Quik Call II experience, so please forgive me. I need to program an old radio to monitor fire calls. I have the RF frequency and they use the following Quik Call II tones:

A : 979.7Hz / B :1513.5Hz

I believe that is the specific station tones. Will the receiver also open up for the ALL CALL tones of A : 979.7Hz / B : 979.7Hz.? Or do I need to program in a second pair of tones?

Also, are most ALL CALLS the long A tone for 8 seconds or does it vary from place to place? Also, if anybody can pass along a good URL to learn more about this? I have Googled it, but what I have found wasn't very helpful?

Bill_G · Post by **Bill_G** » Wed Jan 25, 2012 9:12 pm

You need to specify what model receiver you want to program. Obviously, pagers like the Minitor series can alert to an individual call as well as an all call, but they need to have the correct fields populated. ALL calls are generally long A tones that last about 8 secs. On the other hand, portables generally do not have All call capability. The work around is to program the A and B decode for the same tone, and hope the portable decoder doesn't get picky about the lack of space between the first and second tone.

Jim1348 · Post by **Jim1348** » Wed Jan 25, 2012 11:57 pm

http://www.ltronics.com/paging.htm

I have had this around for a bunch of years. It used to alert me when they set off the civil defense sirens. I had an old Minitor for the fire department. Now, the frequencies changed for fire and, coincidentally, it is the one that is already in the LP-1. Since the LP-1 is already on he correct RF frequency, I thought if I could program it for the Quik Call II for the fire department, that would be great. Now if I can program it for the station that serves me AND know that it will also trip for ALL CALL I am all set. But if it won't work that way, then I will simply program it for the ALL CALL only.

Bill_G · Post by **Bill_G** » Thu Jan 26, 2012 6:08 am

You'll have to contact the OEM about programming. They do not say at the url how the tones are set.

Jim1348 · Post by **Jim1348** » Thu Feb 09, 2012 1:06 am

I have one more Motorola Quik Call II question for experienced people here. Using an A Tone of 979.7Hz, how many possible B tone combinations are possible using standard tones? I seem to recall reading somewhere that only certain B tones can be paired with certain A tones, but I can't seem to find it right now.

SteveC0625 · Post by **SteveC0625** » Thu Feb 09, 2012 5:07 am

Jim1348 wrote:I have one more Motorola Quik Call II question for experienced people here. Using an A Tone of 979.7Hz, how many possible B tone combinations are possible using standard tones? I seem to recall reading somewhere that only certain B tones can be paired with certain A tones, but I can't seem to find it right now.

Here's a primer on two tone paging with all the standard codes: http://genave.com/two-tone_paging.htm including QC-II.

Jim1348 · Post by **Jim1348** » Thu Feb 09, 2012 5:56 am

Thank you for the link. The one thing I am still a little bit confused about, though, is can any code from any group be paired with one another now? For some reason, I seem to recall that a certain code from one groups should, or should not, be paired with another code, but I can't seem to find that specific part of it now.

Bill_G · Post by **Bill_G** » Thu Feb 09, 2012 6:28 am

I seem to recall a similar tone pairing restriction from years ago that was related to decoder falsing. But, back then two tone paging was growing fast. Try as they may to have plenty of unique tones that were not harmonics of another tone, there was still plenty of opportunity for falsing. Cap codes and tone groups helped prevent falsing by keeping close harmonic pairs out of the tone plan.

SteveC0625 · Post by **SteveC0625** » Thu Feb 09, 2012 6:58 am

The Motorola cap code plan has hundreds (if not thousands) of possible tone pairs. *If* there is a potential pairing issue, sticking to the pairs in the charts should avoid any of that.

Also, unless you are building your own encoder, I think you'll find that most commercially available encoders will only let you use tone pairs from the cap code plans. For example, I have an old Motorola Alert Central encoder here that will only do 5 tone pairs and one group call. The tones are all set at the factory via a diode matrix. The chips that make up that diode matrix are no longer available so if I wanted to change the tones in the encoder, I would either have to find some chips from another encoder, or try to build my own.

Since the original question was to set up an alerting receiver to receive specific tones for a fire department, I think it is highly likely that it would be a safe tone pair. Most FD's tones around here are assigned on a coordinated county-wide basis to avoid tone conflicts between departments. And if the FD is already using the tone pair being discussed, it is probably safe to say there is no tone conflict.