Pagers & Dispatch

The Red River Regional Dispatch Center transitioned from an analog voice paging system to a digital text paging system on Jan 13, 2009. All fire and ambulance crews using an analog voice pager (i.e. Motorola Minitor V) began using the Motorola Advisor II digital text pager.

The Cass County Department of Emergency Management provided the funding for the transmitter equipment and installation as well as supplying a one-time allotment of digital pagers to the existing rural fire and ambulance departments. Each department assumed responsible for the programming, repair, and replacement of their allotted pagers as well as the purchase of additional pagers.

Rural fire and ambulance first responders in Cass County had long been dispatched via voice pager, but problems with this analog technology were extremely frustrating. Voice quality varied immensely from area to area depending upon the signal strength and pager messages were often unintelligible or were not received. Analog coverage was inadequate for covering the large geographic area (2,810 square miles) and repeater stations are very expensive. Digital systems are less expensive and can easily and inexpensively be expanded to meet growing requirements. Analog pagers are produced in relatively low quantities which has driven the price out of the range of volunteer organizations. For example, the Motorola Minitor V analog voice pager costs $345 compared to the digital text Motorola Advisor II at $109.

Three digital transmitters were installed at Buffalo, Casselton (AT&T tower), and Kindred to provide strong coverage for Cass County.

However, there are also disadvantages with the digital pager in that it doesn't talk and has a quieter alert tone.  The advantage in voice communications is that the responder doesn't have to read messages while driving. The Minitor voice pager is twice as loud as the Advisor II and can easily wake a responder from deep sleep and overcome a noisy work environment (i.e. farm tractor, cabinet shop, etc).

Click the following link to learn how to operate the pager: Motorola Advisor II User Guide

Advisor II pager:

• Model A03DTS5962BA, Band B
• VHF frequency, range 153-163 MHz
• Single "AA" Alkaline battery that lasts approximately one month
• Alert Response: 78 dB @ 12 inches
• Saves messages when off or when the battery is being changed
• Message time and date stamping that indicates when each message was received
• Up to four individual frequencies can be programmed

Four digital paging formats exist: POCSAG, Golay sequential code, Flex protocol, and ERMES. The Advisor II pager supports both POCSAG and FLEX formats. The POCSAG digital paging scheme was developed by British Telecom as a standard signaling format in the United Kingdom and is now a widely accepted format worldwide. Motorola developed it's FLEX format as a means to send more data faster than the POCSAG protocol. POCSAG and FLEX digital pagers support tone, numeric and alphanumeric messages, but not voice. The most important reasons for paging system operators to use a digital format in lieu of analog is the ability to send more information, faster, to more people. Also, battery energy consumption is greatly reduced because each pager turns off its receiver circuits until the proper frame appears.