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I have a Desktrac that needs to respond to Plectron tones in order to activate a siren. The chords are:
524.8/794.3 for 1 second
582.1/1084.0 for 1 second
How should I set up the QCII on this radio? Do I need to do anything special to make this work?
Desktrac and Plectron tones
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Sounds like you need the desktrac to respond to two different Plectron codes.
The QCII in the Maxtrac radios usally will not respond to the Plectron encoding sequence due to the short timming of each tone.
I use a CommSpec decoder board with the timing changed for Plectron decoding. If the radio has to respond to two sets of tones, use a second CommSpec decoder.
I have done this on a lot of radios in a large county fire system, some stations respond to three different "pages" and light lights, and sound different alarms in the station(s). Most radios are Desktracs with DC /batterey backed power and an interface to a DC powered PA system on the same power source.
The QCII in the Maxtrac radios usally will not respond to the Plectron encoding sequence due to the short timming of each tone.
I use a CommSpec decoder board with the timing changed for Plectron decoding. If the radio has to respond to two sets of tones, use a second CommSpec decoder.
I have done this on a lot of radios in a large county fire system, some stations respond to three different "pages" and light lights, and sound different alarms in the station(s). Most radios are Desktracs with DC /batterey backed power and an interface to a DC powered PA system on the same power source.
Another option yet is that I am going to do away with the PLectron tones all together and set them up with standard QCII tones and the dispatch will have to reprogram. There are 2 separate stations with Desktracs that will each respond to 2 different tones. I don't know why anyone even uses Plectron format yet when all of their equipment will do QCII. The one Desktrac DOES activate currently with the Plectron tones, but I can't get the other to work.
They probley are using plectron format because they used to use a Plectron encoder and home radios (very popular in it's time) and never change when they went to pagers..... I know I still have my Plectron home radio that was issued 23 years ago (and it always works) even though we are using pagers today.
That's correct. They recently switched to county 911 and had them set up for the Plectron tones because they already have them. Laswt month, they siren system was redone by Federal Signal and they had them use Plectron again in the Federal siren conttroller. The siren is activated with the Desktrac from 2 possible channels and not the Federal unit. I'm gonna have to convince them it's time to dump the old chord tones in favor of something a little more common.