RFS going P25 + new paging system

[Longreach]

that got proven with the Mitchell fire, while it mostly worked i dont think people on holidays in Italy needed to know yet a lady who lives less than 1KM from the fire didnt know a thing?
before i get shouted down im aware it was the first time it was used and needs tweaking, still i thought a lady who'd lived within a K of the fire for the past 20 years should have known.
cheers
Matt

[centralcoastscanman]

SMS is available & doesn't require spending bucket loads of money on a new network.

SMS gets delivered on a "best" effort basis, and I use that term very, very loosely. A "no particular effort" basis is more accurate. I'd hate to rely on it for anything important.

I'm sure if you have a better method that can reach a mass amount of people using existing equipment you should suggest it to the ACT Government.

[SKEYGEN]

I'm sure if you have a better method that can reach a mass amount of people using existing equipment you should suggest it to the ACT Government.

I don't need to; they already have a paging network.

[centralcoastscanman]

yeah but one slight problem, paging networks only work with people who have pagers.
If you need to reach the general public by mass, there is only limited ways at present

1) Television
2) Radio
3) Phone ( albeit mobile or land line)

[ivahri]

SMS is available & doesn't require spending bucket loads of money on a new network.

SMS gets delivered on a "best" effort basis, and I use that term very, very loosely. A "no particular effort" basis is more accurate. I'd hate to rely on it for anything important.

Talk about being misquoted... what I actually wrote was:
My understanding is that paging is being used for turnout/incident notification- and that is what you do need it for.

My previous comment quoted in context referred to the use of paging for admin text messages- non critical type. Remove those from the spec & you don't need alpha messaging, at most you need numeric or status type paging. SMS is fine for routine stuff- it is already used that way by FRNSW. Using paging for turnout only also deletes the need for "wide area" paging. As I already pointed out sending turn out messages well outside of the immediate area is pointless & only slows the network, the very thing the network shouldn't contend with.

Richard

[centralcoastscanman]

NSW SES units also use SMS messages as an alternative for paging. It works very well as they don't need to put up with some person in Singapore typing into a computer their paging message

[Chrisco]

I have seen Fire Call tweets cannot remember which brigade

[centralcoastscanman]

hahaha now thats impressive but on the same page disturbing using tweet to fire call a brigade...

[sw sydney scanner]

This morning testing Pmr to Pmr p25 , comparing to grn p25. Grn p25 much louder than Pmr.
Grn p25 8/10 , Pmr p25 4/10. Hearing testing on tg 10049

[cartman]

In the past Talkgroup 10049 (RFS Hornsby) was mainly PMR Patching to P25... it looks like now there is a move to the GRN this fire season as I have seen last weekend a heap of new radio ids appearing on 10049

Grant