Batboard

I was looking at the specifications of the Motorola Minitor V Pager and it shows:

12 Alert Tones Per Channel. Supports 8 two-tone pairs and 4 long-tone alerts

Is that the most in the industry? Although I am a deputy sheriff, I do assist our emergency manager and over the years I have been able to tip people to events pending by being able to listen to what is going on around the county. We recently switched to an 800 mHz P-25 trunked radio system. Along with that switch they have two VHF high band frequencies for paging the fire departments and activating the civil defense sirens. I think I will be okay with 8 two-tone pairs and 4 long-tone alerts, but if there is one with more I would like to know about it. Also, for the dual frequency model of Minitor V, does it support 8 two-tone pairs and 4 long-tone alerts for channel 1 and then could it support 8 completely different two-tone pairs and 4 long-tone alerts for channel 2, or is it 8 two-tone pairs and 4 long-tone alerts total for both channel 1 and channel 2? We alert for 12 different fire departments. Six of the fire departments plus an ambulance service are on the west channel. There are another six on the east channel. So if I focus on the west zone I could probably get most of the tones programmed in, plus the two-tone pair for the civil defense sirens for the city I live in. I assume that although some of these scan, the channel to monitor for pages has to have an absolute priority on scan, otherwise the pages would be missed.

The pager supports 8 two-tones and 4 long-tones per channel, as the ad states. As far as I know, this is the best in the undustry.

The M5 is designed to provide tone alerting on two channels. I believe that, when in silent (non-monitor) mode, it returns to scan from a busy channel as soon as it determines the channel is not busy with a tone. I use quite a few M5s on two channels (1 county channel, 1 city) and haven't noticed missing pages due to the other channel being busy.

Bear in mind that the two channels will both need to fall into one available bandsplit.

My M5 is configured with 5 two-tones and 1 long-tone on channel 1, and 4 two-tones on channel 2. No problems.

Thank you very much for the reply. What are the available bandsplits on these?

Also, of the portable transceivers available, what is the largest number of tones available on these? I did have a Visar a few years back set up for two-tone sequential and it worked out pretty well. I only had it set up for a single long tone B setting. I guess I don't know if the newer HT1550s or others will do a number of two-tone pairs or not.

If you are looking for more than 8 you can also check out the SwissPhone RE629. You can have 32 two-tone sets and scan up to 50 channels in these pagers and the tone sets can be assigned to multiple frequencies. Although right you can only go 1mhz for the bandwidth(ie. if your tuning frequency is 155.500 you can program 155.000 to 156.000) they are releasing an 8mhz split this year.

I purchased some of these for my fire dept last year and we have had good results with them.

Thank you for that post. We use both 151.295 and 154.785, so that would require a wait for the newer model if I selected SwissPhone. Here is the URL I was looking at:

http://www.swissphone.com/portal/alias_ ... fault.aspx

The software looks pretty spendy, but then so is Motorola software.

Jim1348 wrote:The software looks pretty spendy, but then so is Motorola software.

Err? M5 software is a free download from Mother M's website.

Oh, sorry, yes it is, which actually surprised me. Usually "FREE" and "Motorola" aren't in the same sentence. What I should have said is normally they are pretty expensive on their software.

Jim1348 wrote:Oh, sorry, yes it is, which actually surprised me. Usually "FREE" and "Motorola" aren't in the same sentence. What I should have said is normally they are pretty expensive on their software.

That is true of the land mobile radio group. That has, as far as I know, never been true of the paging group... software from them has, for many years, been either a download or a line-item part with no Draconian license agreement - and usually $10 or less.