I am curious about the "tones" broadcast on scanners to alert fire
departments and ems services that an incoming transmission pertains to
them; I want to know the frequencies of which are used at a given service.

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Request for Question Clarification by byrd-ga on 28 Jul 2003 19:33 PDT

Hi Spanishfreak,

As you may or may not know, different areas use different frequency
bands for this purpose.  Which area or specific service were you
trying to find the frequencies for?  The more detail you can give, the
better we may be able to help you.

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Clarification of Question by spanishfreak88-ga on 29 Jul 2003 14:33 PDT

The comment posted by arcadesdude is what i am referring to.  When a
call comes over the scanner from dispatch to alert a particular
service that their assistance is needed, the radio transmission is
preceded by a number of DTMF tones.  I am just curious if there is a
resource available to identify the pitches of these tones for various
fire departments/ems services.  I live in Somerset County,
Pennsylvania and wish to learn all of the tones for the different
services in my area.  Thank you for your interest in my question.

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Request for Question Clarification by byrd-ga on 29 Jul 2003 19:44 PDT

It would seem that specific details on the DTMF tones used by
individual fire and ems services in Somerset (or any) County are not
available as public information.  I could, however, provide you with a
list of all the fire and ems departments in Somerset County, together
with their numbers (608, 902, 655, etc.) as well as discrete
frequencies, telephone numbers and urls for those with an online
presence.  In addition, I could provide you with information on how
DTMF and 2+2 and other tones are used with regard to fire departments
in Pennsylvania and other locations, as well as links to decoding
software that you could use in conjunction with your radio to decode
the actual tone being broadcast.  It may be that the DTMF codes are
based on such things as phone or station number, which could be
checked against such a list for verification. If this information
would be acceptable to you as an answer, please advise and I will be
glad to post it as such.  If not, perhaps another Researcher will have
better success in locating the information you're seeking.  Thank you.

My grandfather worked in the Fire Police for many years and he told me
that each department has a specific tone that specifies his station.
So the tones would alert a specific district/unit for the Fire Police.
Usually the tones were about 4 notes or so, some longer than others,
some shorter.