RadioBanter - Hillsborough County Florida 800 Mhz system

I'm not sure if this information has been posted yet as it occurred fairly
recently, but here goes:

For those of you who like to listen to the Fire & Rescue traffic from the
Hillsborough County Emergency Dispatch Center on the Hillsborough County,
Florida Ericsson GE EDACS 800 Mhz system, a change has taken place in how
they dispatch calls.

They no longer "simulcast" on the 800 Mhz system and their older VHF
frequencies when the main dispatcher (referred to as the "gatekeeper" or the
"gate" and often heard being called this by the field unit's) initially
dispatches a call for a unit or station to run.

In the near recent past, the "gatekeeper" was heard both on the 800 Mhz
EDACS system and their old VHF County Fire Control frequencies (154.130 Mhz
for the Eastside stations and 154.175 Mhz for the Westside stations) at the
same time, and quite often (except for the very newest stations) were heard
paging tones that were used to open up the VHF radio pagers (Motorola,
Plectron, etc).

However due to the expense and difficulty in maintaining the VHF
transmitter's used to broadcast the VHF radio pagers tones, it was decided
to pull the plug on the decades old VHF radio pagers (Motorola, Plectron,
etc) and use telephone based pagers that are tied into the EDC computer and
when a call is dispatched, a signal is sent to the telephone paging server
to broadcast a page to that unit and also a signal is sent to the station to
generate a "Tear and Go" or "Grab and Go" printout of the call information
that goes with them to the call.

So in a nutshell, there is no longer any VHF traffic to be heard for
Hillsborough County Fire & Rescue, just the Ericsson GE EDACS 800 Mhz
system, no more pager tones to alert scanner listeners that a call is going
out, instead the "gatekeeper" announces "Emergency Call" or "Non Emergency
Call" (as the case might be) and then gives out the call information once.

There is one "old timer" dispatcher there who has a real deep voice who
likes to pretend he is AOL with mail, as in "Emergency Call", I think he
does it just to pass the time and amuse himself, but it gets your attention,
listen out for him sometimes, he never seems to get excited about anything,
but just sounds tired all of the time, (somebody told me that he's been
there almost 30 years!)

When the unit's respond they respond on their appropriate frequency (TAC 1
for East and South stations and TAC 2 for North and West stations) and when
the Rescue Ambulances come available from the hospital (or scene if no pick
up), they come available on the "gatekeeper" main dispatcher (the Engines do
this on the TAC frequencies), this seems to have something to do with zoning
as the Rescue Ambulances are moved around more often than the Engines to
cover empty areas of coverage.

Hope this information is useful to both old timers and newcomers to the
field of radio scanning.

"Old Ambulance Guy"