NOVA voice pager (USAlert)

Ett1033 · Post by **Ett1033** » Sun Dec 05, 2004 7:50 pm

Anybody have any experiences with this pager in the FD environment. I got a demo for a week and it seemed ok. I have been sending Minitor III's & IV's in weekly for repair, and frankly I am tired of it. I am not too enthused about the new minitor V due out in '05. I think this is my only other option since I need it to do several sets of tones.
Thoughts?
Thanks.

Eric · Post by **Eric** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 6:41 am

I have 40 of them in service in a Rescue Squad. In the year and a half that they have had them I've had to send 3 in for repair, and always got
them back promptly. All of the guys seem to like them and we haven't had any performance issues.

Gocart878 · Post by **Gocart878** » Sun Jan 02, 2005 8:09 am

we have about 45 of them in service, they are commonly sent back for the top reset button sticking and these units are not self servicable. the speaker soldering is also very cheap, they often break with no sound being heard, also they have an audio hold section which can get annoying when wearing turnout gear becuase you will hear constant squelch. These radios are very fragile, the screens are often cracked and broken while performing misc fd activites, and they are not as loud as motorola. If you break your radio and it is out of warranty, 1 year i believe, they will charge you to ship the unit to and from the repair facility which is in florida and 42 dollars just to look at the radio and see what wrong with it a rip off in my case.Otherwise i give this radio a D+, compared to the min 4 they are absolute junk, the min 4 is 75% better than the nova. if i were you, stick with motorola, they are may not seem much better, but they are alot better than the US alert.

chipjumper · Post by **chipjumper** » Sun Jan 02, 2005 9:22 am

I just did an inventory of our alert pagers and we have six in circulation. They work fine except for one sent back for a stuck top button and one sent in a few days ago because it couldn't be programmed. After looking at the abuse they take (i.e. dropped in toilet,snow,puddles,used by farmers) I give them an "OK-GOOD" rating. Personally I think they are not user-friendly like a Minitor II or IV (motorola have vol./on-off switch and simple mode selector) compared to the USAlert NOVA (menu select and scroll buttons plus several options...).

We just took order of a Swissphone Quattrino pager. Allegedly it is the "most used alert pager in Europe". The frequency is crystal-controlled (permanently set by factory in Switzerland) but the tone freq's are programmable. I had ours for about two days and sent it back to be reprogrammed because we had changed our reed freq's and I forgot to change the order. It has a neat little display that that will show up to four departments (will decode up to 16 total) and will display an arrow by which station/dept was toned out. This is especially nice for station responses. Otherwise, it felt very durable and not cheap. I'll be interested in its longevity on our "break-every-pager" fire dept. Paging & Wireless Service Center in FL sells them. We paid $300.00 for one with everything---remember they ship these from Switzerland so there is a significant lead time (2-4 weeks). Apparently in Europe they're only a few paging frequencies so they can stockpile; I guess they were very suprised how us Americans use everything available in the spectrum---making it not-cost effective to stockpile.

PM me in a few weeks and I can keep yah posted on the status of the Quattrino.