Batboard

So I have a bunch of Minitor IV's and V's to program and I have a few questions that I'm sure somebody on here knows the answers to:

1. I know the standard tone timing of 1 second (A tone) / 3 Second (B tone)…can tone B be shortened up? For those in the LA area, I know Ventura County has really short tones now and they're running Minitors as well. Anything special to worry about when doing this?

2. I'm revamping all the tones for a small department and starting from scratch. Do both Tone A and B have to come from the same reed group? Can you mix and match all the groups at will? For A/B-Long C, does the Long C have to come from the same reed group as A and B?

3. Is there generally any pattern you pick for creating tone pairs for units? Or is it all preference? Any kind of standard practice or spacing?

Thanks for any help you can provide!

LACityFD wrote:So I have a bunch of Minitor IV's and V's to program and I have a few questions that I'm sure somebody on here knows the answers to:

1. I know the standard tone timing of 1 second (A tone) / 3 Second (B tone)…can tone B be shortened up? For those in the LA area, I know Ventura County has really short tones now and they're running Minitors as well. Anything special to worry about when doing this?

I am not sure what kind of tone system Ventura County is running. If they are using QC-I timing, it's 1 sec/200 ms pause/1 sec. You'd have to know the exact duration of the tones and the interval to determine this. The V's can't do QC-I timing as far as I can tell. Determine the timing before we talk about shortening up tones more. There's too many unknowns to give you an answer.

LACityFD wrote:2. I'm revamping all the tones for a small department and starting from scratch. Do both Tone A and B have to come from the same reed group? Can you mix and match all the groups at will? For A/B-Long C, does the Long C have to come from the same reed group as A and B?

AFAIK, you can certainly take tone A from one group and tone B from another. My county is set up that way. They use one tone from one group and then up to ten tones from a second group. That allows them to assign ten tone pairs to each department. For example, from Group-2, the A tone is fixed as tone 121 or 600.9. The B tones come from Group-5 and all ten B tones are allocated to the same department. The next department gets 122 (634.5) for the A tone and the same ten B tones from Group 5. And so on.

The B tones are assigned in the same sequence for each department. 1X1 is the fire siren and 1X2 is the pagers. The other 8 codes are for officer groups or single pages within the department. Agencies determine the assignment if any beyond the first two.

You can also reverse the process. Use Group-5 for the A tone and Group-2 for the B tone. By doing that, you can assign ten tone pairs each to 20 different agencies.

One thing to avoid is to not use the same tone for A and B. That creates a single tone of 4 seconds. It isn't long enough to be relied on as a long C tone. Long C is 8 seconds.

LACityFD wrote:3. Is there generally any pattern you pick for creating tone pairs for units? Or is it all preference? Any kind of standard practice or spacing?

Thanks for any help you can provide!

Just the follow Motorola chart and follow something similar to what I described above.

NOW! Before you set up any tone system, understand that tone assignments are usually assigned from the county fire coordinator or dispatch center, etc. Generally, departments contact them and ask for tone assignments. The actual tones are assigned back to you based on their code plan. This avoids conflicts and bad assignments. If you have your own private channel, have at it. If you're in any kind of central dispatch, they assign the tones, not you.