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When i listen to the fire channel...there is a tone that last for a few seconds, then they tell whats going on. I believe its called tone. I see firefighters where a little pager on their belt, is it like a scanner? Anyways the questions is:

1) I have a Pro 95, can i some how program the scanner so when the tone goes out it turns on...or i can hear it. How do i program it if i can. Does that work with police...they have a quicker noise like beep beep. Can i program my sccanner so it i won't hear them running drivers all night long but pop on when it hears that tone for a code call?

2) How can i find the tone for the freq? Is it on the FCC website database?


thanks.

On the PRO-95 you cannot set to go off on those tones. Up here in Okanogan County, we have similar tones, and its for our pagers we carry like you describe, motorola minitors II, III, IV, when the tones go off for particular department a series of two or three beeps go off, thats the page. At the fire stations there is a console were a pager sits in and when the tone for that department go off it activates the sirn on top of the building. i hope I did not confuse you.
mike

You are most likely hearing what is called "2 tone paging". Sometimes it is a long single tone (group code), so don't let the term confuse you.

As other posters have mentioned, Minitor pagers can be programmed so the person carrying them does not play any radio traffic until they are called. Nowadays many 2 way radio manufacturers sell radios that can be programmed to decode these tones.

Dispatch sends the tone(s) and then speaks. The pagers (and many 2 way radios) may be programmed to open squelch upon recipt of the tone. Then the person carrying the pager (or radio) can hear the call.

I am not aware of any scanners that will decode 2 tone.

ICOM offers an F50/F60 portable, and F121/F221 mobile that can be programmed to decode up to 10 different 2 tone (or long single tone "group") codes.

73's
N7QOR

Thanks for the information!

And then again, if you're listening to larger departments radio traffic the tones you may be hearing are simply alert ("attention") tones which don't control anything. The tone pitch conveys information to those listening to the radio. Seattle used to use three single tones to indicate a fire response but that has changed. They now use an alternating hi-low tone kind of like a 'tweedle-dee'. But none of the tones does any kind of electronic receiver control like turn on a pager. Don't get me wrong. Seattle DOES use pagers, but the paging data is sent out on a different radio frequency than the voice dispatching is done on and it's now ASCII rather than "dual-tone" like the (smaller) departments use.