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So there's a debate that's been sparked recently in my circle of people and I'd like for those with practical experience in fire response to chime in on this. Specifically uniformed fire firefighters but all of you can of course comment...

Is transferring a 9-1-1 call to a radio channel via an interconnect/patch/phone coupler a valid practice?

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I taste copper.
Comments, views, opinions - and trails of destruction - are my own.

I'm a 30 year paid fire guy and I have no idea what your talking about. So whatever it is your referring to is not common to a uniformed fire guy.

I think this may be more of a question to a 911 call taker or a dispatcher. But to answer your question it is not common to patch a 911 caller to a responding law enforcement officer, ems, or firefighters radio.

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a 'valid practice'

well that seems all to interpretation, in a city like seattle that is not valid.

in a city like wilber, wa absolutely.

in larger city you have disp. teams for a reason to make efficient use of communication from the public to the emergency staff.

in wilber with one dispatcher for the county, the firefighter gets better communication from the 911 caller to effective do the job over a radio direct



example

Seattle "911 your patched to a firefighter. Hello? my cat its stuck in a tree MAM THIS IS FIRE COMMAND WHAT IS YOUR CAT NAME muffy and she is sooo scared and Im missing opra"

Wilber "911 I will patch you with your local volunteer FD, hello? yes frank its sam my dog just bit me in the field, WHICH FIELD ARE YOU IN SAM the south property near the irrigation pump"


im not a FD but I do plan FEMA and emergency issues. so thats my take if I were to solve this issue for someone. (this post is for usual and normal, minded that anything should be possible with radio and disp switching equipment for out of normal operation)

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If I had an antenna, I would; but I can only transmit on 160 meters.
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DE K7MHI

Depends on what is being said over the air waves that is audible to anyone within a few mile radius with a scanner.

HIPPA law prohibits revealing information over the radio such as a patients name. If the caller reveals any sensitive information while calling into 911 and it is transmitted over radio waves such as my orafice is bleeding and my name is billybob and I live at 1600 easy avenue, then there's going to be a problem and a large lawsuit...Same thing with interviews by the news media. We can't say, "It was a family of four that lived in the burned down home: a mom and a dad and 2 kids" because in the chaos at the scene in reality it was a gay man and his mate and the two kids were actually not theirs, just some kids who were associated as theirs because they came out of the neighbors house to watch the fire trucks...Keep it plan and simple...or better yet, make the white helmet talk on camera.

Valid practice? My sentiments are echoed as in Spud's comments. The local Community College has a phone patch on their repeater for security personnel. The phone rings into the office and if nobody answers, it's then rang over the UHF radio repeater. The security guard punches a few buttons on his radio and says, "YVCC Security." The caller then states what the problem is and he responds back, "Alright I'm on my way" and then punches a couple more buttons to hang up the patch. In that situation when there is a huge campus and only a few guards at night, when they are on patrol and someone calls into the security office and no one is there to answer, it rings through to their radios where the call can be received. For this situation-- yes, practical. For a large city with already jammed airwaves...not so much. You've heard all the radio traffic during a large fire or shooting, imagine If someone was sitting there talking like they were on the phone...ANNOYING! SHIT'S GOING DOWN GET OFF THE RADIO!!

Plus for non-emergent stuff (i.e. cat in tree) the dispatcher could jusy say, "The phone number to the fire department is 966-3111 just give them a call since your situation is not life threatening and not a real emergency." (which is the only reason 911 is there) :horse:

It's all about time and efficiency...fire doubles in size every 60 seconds and for every minute that goes by during cardiac arrest, the chance of survival decreases by 10% and so on and so on...

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Interoperability is an attitude, not a technology.

I recall something similar but not over the radio. Lewis Co 911 did or still does 'patch' the audio of 911 calls or at least fire/ems calls to the Centralia Fire station as it is career staffed over their loudspeaker inside the station. There were some complaints that people walking by might hear some of the private details of the calls. Don't know if they still do this.

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"I was installing un-programmed radios"

The closest thing I've ever seen to this is Spokane County SO's phone patch they have on their radio system and on State Dept of Wildlife (159.420).. When Spokane first set it up (1980's), you could hear both sides of the conversation as it is repeated! After about 3 months of this, they changed it; either because the equipment was finally installed like it was suppose to be or they realized a lot of people had figured out the new channel plan! Anyway, they made it so the only thing you could hear on the output channel was the person on the other end (landline) and when the deputy talks, it gives a phone 'busy signal' sound across the the air. But if you put the input frequency in and set it to Priority and locked it on the output, you could pretty much hear both sides fairly well. The one time I heard such traffic on D.o.W., you could hear both sides of the conversation across the repeater. Other than that, in my travels back and forth across the state, I've never heard anything else like this to include [Wilbur] WA. (Lincoln County) which is dispatched from Davenport and is the county seat.

One more memory, Connell PD in N Franklin County had a interconnect simplex, in lieu of a dispatcher on 154.785 back in the 80's and 90's but I think it's gone. One could hear everything over it.

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"I was installing un-programmed radios"

About a year ago (wrote about it here) I saw a flare and called into CG PA and was patched to Sector Seattle and after a few minutes was patched to the helo (over 157.05) so I could let them know when they hit the mark. I must have been patched for 20 minutes. Heard it once before and never again since then.

Which city was it back in the day, somewhere in Yakima or Benton counties, where the police line (7 digits) would ring to the cop on patrol's car radio?

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President-in-Exile, Seattle Area Radio Communications And Scanner Traffic Intercept Crew (SARCASTIC)
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I worked on a system like that for Skagway

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I generate Board Warnings

mind you I used Wilber as a example, just a "small town usa", to give a example of how it is used in a lower budget and slower area (like the community college example) not to specify that wilber uses these practices.

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If I had an antenna, I would; but I can only transmit on 160 meters.
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DE K7MHI

Awesome, thanks for all the replies!

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I taste copper.
Comments, views, opinions - and trails of destruction - are my own.

Is this what you're sort of talking about? If not, still interesting...

http://sev.prnewswire.com/telecommunica ... 009-1.html

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Interoperability is an attitude, not a technology.

No the debate here was if putting a live, screaming, frantic 9-1-1 caller patched directly into a half duplex patch to a radio system is a viable option or not to get information to the field faster. Me personally I was leaning towards the "you've got to be kidding me camp" but I understand that this may be the practice in smaller towns. The topic came up when discussing a much, much larger metropolis though. 'We just make the equipment, we don't make end-user policy' is how we decided to end that argument.

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I taste copper.
Comments, views, opinions - and trails of destruction - are my own.

There are a handful of these systems in rural parts of the midwest and New England.