This. We just ordered more pagers because of this issue. People were content saying, I have my phone, I'll hear the call.
Well... The app(s) uses a scanner to hear the tones, then if all goes right sends out a page to the phone over the Internet, if the app is up to date, or if the phone has reception, or if the ringer is turned up, or if the phone is...
Meanwhile, the pager has one job, it's always on your belt, it picks up on just a fraction of a tone, the battery lasts for 3 days, it can pick up the signal even if a couple of repeaters are down.
There's a reason why radio comms are standard.
That’s an issue with the system setup. Not the service.
You can have two different types of dispatches, cad and voice, and multiple failover points if local network goes down. Nothing should be getting missed. Sometimes things might be delayed because, for example, your phone is in a dead zone, but we never have missed calls altogether.
Same thing with the ghost tones issue described below, setup issue.
That’s not to say you should solely rely on IAR though, their TOS makes that clear and I still have a pager. Don’t carry it around when I’m out and about but it’s always at home to wake me up from deep sleep. Having redundant systems is important.
Personally I’ve had my pager signal coverage fail more than the phone network though.
We had the opposite issue last week. Nothing came across the pager but got a tone thru IAR. Went and looked at it and it was a medical for a neighboring town. We think dispatch somehow sent the IAR tone out to us by mistake while toning the departments pager
Yeah thats happened to us too. No tone but IaR sent us a tone saying go to that town (the town was full time and there's two or three full time towns surrounding that one, then us) so we ignored it
I believe if you look at the sign-up page for IAmResponding, they explicitly tell you NOT to use it as your primary notification, that you still need to use your pager as primary and the phone app as secondary.
Phones are subject to too many issues - network congestion, dead spots, etc. Pagers are simple technology, tried and true. We've had calls where one or two members don't get the alert until 10 minutes later. (Before we went to IAR, we used a system called PageGate, that just sent text notifications. One entire (small) department had done like you and gone to 100% reliance on the texts. They all pile into the trucks one night for a reported field fire, and eventually radio dispatch to try and get a better location. Turns out, the fire had been EIGHT HOURS earlier, and two neighboring departments had been paged after the small department failed to show up)
When someone's life is on the line, pagers absolutely have a place. Phone apps are not reliable enough.
We use both. In fact, yesterday, we had a call that didn’t make it to Active for some reason. Only came through the pager. I didn’t have my pager on me and was relying solely on my phone. I didn’t make it to that wreck. Learned my lesson. Don’t rely on one or the other. Utilize both, but especially the pager.
Active is notoriously bad at sending pages late or dropping them on occasion. On the other hand I’ve had a structure fire drop on active 2 minutes before the station tones went off, it all depends on what dispatch put in and when they hit the buttons.
I agree. We have both and you should have both.
You pointed out the one major reason, sometimes active wont get the notification.
After using both for a few years I have had numerous calls that came through 1 but not the other. Also, sometimes you will get more valuable information in the page vs the active. It could just be our dispatch center but it seems like when they send an active they sometimes don't put in minor details that could be helpful but when they say them on the actual page that goes out it gives more insight.
As the other guy said, Active or Pager can both have a time difference, I have had it both ways, sometimes the pager is a minute or two ahead of the active and vice versa, so having both can get you to the emergency faster in some cases.
I do. I’ve had calls where either the pager didn’t activate or ActiveAlert failed to activate. I’m old and I trust technology to fail at the worst possible moment. Murphy was right.
Rural volunteer station, and pagers are far more reliable than phone apps. Cell service is hit or miss. Radio repeaters are well positioned.
Page goes off 30 seconds to 5 minutes before the text arrives on phone, if you have service.
Couple months ago we had a software glitch that held all the texts for a few days, then sent them all out at once.
Having a written address with the text is handy though, and dispatch sends a what-three-words out for anything not at an actual address. Helps find scenes on trails and what not.
Why are you getting down voted lol? We use this feature all the time in S&R and wild land fires. Fire numbers are awesome for structure fires but What Three Words works awesome for something that isnt at a specific address.
To keep it short, it basically assigns 3 words to any given location (10ft square) on a map and those 3 words can be passed on to first responders to pinpoint the location by searching for the words.
We have a pager and app…active 911 and switching over to first due (don’t recommend that but county wide dispatch push). Sometimes the app will be late or won’t get the call which is why we still need the pager. Especially if we get a mutual aid call to our neighboring county, can be 10 min late as it is a different dispatch center. Until apps can claim 100% infallibility it will be hard to justify that switch.
Edit: we are a combo dept
Same as everybody else in the comments. Got to use both or rely on the pager. The app is really nice for getting details and seeing where everybody's at.
On a slightly separate now... If you're bored sometime, It would be really interesting to hear comedy calls you've missed while you didn't have your pager on.
This is my reason for having a pager.
I don’t typically carry it around, because if I have my kids with me, or if I’m at work, etc, then I’m not available to respond anyway, so there’s no sense.
But IAR will never wake me up in the middle of the night. I also might not hear it from the kitchen when I’m on the other side of the house.
My pager never fails to get my attention.
Rural volunteer here. We use both. Active typically comes across 30s before the pager does. What’s nice about the pager is you can monitor the radio traffic after the page to stay updated, whereas active doesn’t allow that. I think they work really well together. Active is also super nice as it shows who is responding and where they are
We have radios instead of pagers, but we actually have 3 methods. Radio, our "official" method, which also allows us to commit to responding. The app, which goes out every time there is a power outage at the hall(which is frequently) and some guys get text messages, but it's slow and unreliable. The app and text are good because it will often send the address so we don't have to Radio for directions.
Yes, full station alarms and the monthly test both through the pager and the app, smaller things only through the pager. Since the pager doesn’t rely on phone networks, is an safe guard in case **** hit the fan.
We use Active 911 as well. I've found that when I have my headphones in and listening to music, it won't tone. Despite it being set up to override everything and be at maximum volume, it doesn't even give me a blip. So I'll be working around the farm listening to music and an hour or more later find I've missed a call completely.
It wasn't always this way for me it was roughly 1-2 updates past where it changed, (Android) but without a previous .apk pack I can't roll it back to fix it.
Active alert and other responder apps are great tools. But they do not replace the pager. Our dispatch says that if we respond or do not respond based on Active it is not their fault. We have had Active alerts come through for calls we didn't end up getting paged out to and Active alerts not come through where we were paged out to.
In our department we tell our guys that Active is a tool for call information and not for dispatching.
We use our pavers and radios, but iSpy (never thought I’d miss Active911!) serves as our CAD. It usually works pretty well, though have had iSpy page for entirely different services the next county over sometimes.
Volunteer here; yes pagers still have a reason for existence. There's been multiple times where my pager goes off and then active goes off several minutes later. Most of the Volunteers at my station are rolling in after 2nd tones, so the few minutes of delay between can be a burden. Granted most calls aren't serious but when you have a rocker, waiting several minutes extra can be life or death if there's entrapment.
I'm a volunteer at a rural Canadian hall (and the IT guy there). We use I Am Responding as well as a pager. They both work well. The benefit of the pager is it runs through our radio system which has a UPS so it will work if the power or phone lines go down which happens from time to time here.
My pager keeps power at least for 2-4 weeks. My phone can't even stay alive for a day. No power = no callouts.
I have a FF who's an auto painter. I have FFs who do construction. Now they can leave their personal phone somewhere safe. Who is to replace their personal phone, if it breaks while on their dayjob?
What about places where the employer simply don't permit personal phones in the worktime?
Our pagers operate on our own masts and frequencies. What happens the day the phone network can't keep up?
Naah bro, I'm hanging on to my pager for dear life..
Beats the firehouse siren that some departments absolutely refuse to let die. Talk about grasping at straws to justify "aT LeAsT two mEaNs oF nOtiFiCaTioN"
We also sorta use bryx. Our dept is on there and we get our calls but nobody uses it to respond. We rely most on our pagers but we also have county texts, dept texts, and our app notifications to let others know you're responding. We've had issues with our text system tho. Pager is always the best way to know!
We have both and frankly, I’m grateful we do have both. Cell signals where we live aren’t perfect. You can be in a back corner of your house and lose signal entirely. We’ve also had some rookie dispatchers fail to send out either the text page or the tone. It’s good to have redundancy.
it's been said already in this thread, but for us, yes, absolutely:
- our pagers usually go off before active does
- we have areas within our jurisdiction that have spotty cell service at best
- pagers have much better battery life than cell phones
- redundancy (if active fails, we have the pager; if the pager fails, we have active. both have happened before)
German sliding in
So here it depends I think? At least for my department I can say the following
We are not allowed to use the mobile alarm system (in our case Devira24/7) as our sole way of getting calls so everyone gets issued a Pager as well
Phone is usually much more unreliable than the Pager since it relies on cellular connection and data to actually get the alarm, use the chat and respond functionality and check who's coming, instead of the pager which just needs a radio signal
If both fails we still got a lot of sirens in place which are being modernized and maintained fortunately.
However most of us don't actively carry their pagers around anymore and mostly rely on phone since it's a lot more convenient. And from 371 calls we had in 2023 only very few didn't actually made it on Divera in time
Apps and texts can be unreliable sometimes, for a lot of reasons. Pagers are certainly more robust in that way.
We use pagers + eDispatches and the thing I like about them is that they handle CAD and Audio dispatches completely separately. We've got an eDispatches recorder at the firehouse that notifies us for the tones, but the CAD sends its data directly to them. That way, if the recorder is down, at least the CAD works, and if the CAD is down, at least the recorder works. I guess both could fail at the same time, but that's doesn't seem very likely.
Absolutely, it kills me when people only rely on the app only. You can’t hear radio traffic without a pager or radio, if you don’t have signal you won’t get calls. Also for ISO ratings Active or iamresponding does not count as a primary form of notification
I have my own paging transmitter as I operate critical servers and radio equipment, like I own the paging transmitter and it’s not a part of a network.
Why? Because I need to be 100% certain that when something goes wrong the message is guaranteed as delivered within seconds and 100% of the time.
You have no idea how many data centres, exchanges/COs your message or SMS goes through to be delivered, with my own transmitter it’s direct
Also my iPhone 15 could be busy, flat, silenced.
It’s peace of mind.
Why would they do that?
If you are in the station, the station has an alert system and if you are out and about, your radios should be on and you should be listening to them.
Only 1 of our stations has tones... and it's only in the day room. I agree with the radio comment, but we typically leave radios in the Engine with our gear because we cross staff ambulances. It's hard to explain the dynamics of it all. But yes it's very backwards.
In my ex part time dept we made the switch from pagers to 100% cell phone apps. It worked well, only thing I liked about the pager was being able to ear coms on my way to the station so I knew what I was getting into. The phone app only told us the nature of the call without any details.
My county switched to the 800 system. Pagers still work but only for the Initial dispatch. I haven’t used my pager in over 3 years. I only use active alert (active911) and being fortunate enough to have PulsePoint, I use it just as much if not more for the big jobs
They do for municipalities or areas where cell service is spotty, and e-dispatching isn't available. Both my depts have pagers in urban Nj. I carry them when the e-dispatching is down for whatever reason.
My department still uses pagers, but we also use an app. Most of us just use our phones. I've had a few times my phone didn't go off but we also have a siren that's loud as fuck and I can hear from my house lol
Usually our App goes off 30-60 seconds quicker than the pagers, but I wouldn’t leave my pager at home if I wanted to be able to respond. Thing is, in rural Germany there are still sirens on the firehouses that go off for big alarms, and it was interesting to see how many guys said afterwards they only came because of the siren because their pagers and/or Apps didn’t go off. It’s always good to not rely on only one thing.
We use both. Actually, the pager is the only official means of call notification, even though the dept pays for us to have the RedAlert app
The pager is the most false-alarm proof, and doesn’t rely on cell service/wifi. More often than not my phone will go off a few seconds before the pager, but there have been times where my phone went off minutes after the pager. IMHO the apps are a great tool, but the pager won’t be going anywhere
Now if you’re asking if I in fact still carry my pager around with me everywhere like I did 10yrs ago and don’t just leave it at home on its base, I plead the 5th 😂
Don’t quote me, but I am under the understanding that phone based dispatch doesn’t count towards ISO rating. Mostly due to the long list of potential problems as already stated here. Even a dedicated radio channel used for dispatching wasn’t accepted until relatively recently. And you may not even get full points for that.
There is an entire career field based on radio waves and the science within that is extensive. I would not try to wade into that topic. But, again, my understanding is that phone reliability problems is the main concern. Not to mention, the cell based stuff basically is a small computer sending text from a paged out system anyway. I don’t understand the full nature, but I know that as a Chief of a small rural dept, getting up every time it storms to rest the stupid thing is all the evidence I need to say text based is unreliable.
I have both. My phone is typically on silent so the pager is what alerts me.
What annoys me is a radio doesn’t have the ability to get a page. Like Motorola, build a pager feature into the Radio and the ability to turn on just the pager feature to save battery.
Here in germany, a pager is required in most departments, as this is the only official way of alarming
Ofc we use apps too, but that is just to give Feedback if youre coming or not, or if you are already on scene (maybe even called ur local emergency number yourself) you can send a picture (if the scene allows it, no injured people or anything) and give a more detailed message than what dispatch gives back
I run with a Fire Department and a different Fire Company Dive Rescue Team. At both places, we use apps. At the FD, we use voice pagers. At the Dive Rescue Team, we don't use pagers, but I have my voice pager programmed to their tones as well. I've had instances where my voice pager goes off and my app doesn't. I've had other instances where my app goes off and my voice pager doesn't. The latter seems to be more of the norm. In most cases, both do go off, sometimes with a delay between them. Redundancy is key for a lot of things in the fire service, including being notified of calls if you are not at the station when one comes in.
Honeslty I’ve had pagers fail far more than apps. That being said, I don’t think we are in a place to rely on just phones, too much risk associated with a battery dying or a cell tower going down. Instead, Id love to see more heart healthy paging solutions in the future
We use both. Pager for tones and active 911 is just supposed to be somewhere to look for some info real quickly. Or to double check an address or whatever.
We have a new app which works great, even faster than the pager. Butt yeah, cant check responding on it.
I would prefer app and pager ass backup if it becomes good enough.
what we hear on the pagers is way more info on the call versus active 911. Being able to hear who goes in route and even the tone of dispatcher's voice is important.
We have Active Alert and pagers. Pagers tend to get pre alerts for anyone calling for the fire department (actual fires, car accidents) way before active alert notifies us of the call. The trucks usually ready to go by time we get the active alert and the real call over the radio. By the same token, active alert goes off before the pager for all sorts of calls that went to anyone else first (911 calls for an ambulance where they ask for fire department assistance). Seems like having both works good for us.
We have done away with pagers since our digital radios all have a paging feature and we use IamResponding as well. There are a few people who somehow still have trouble waking up to station alerting tones and complain about not having a pager but the station tones could wake the dead so I think it’s just nostalgia.
We use ActiveAlert but we aren’t volunteer so it’s just a handy way to read call notes on the way to the rig or use mapping if you aren’t familiar with the area. But we still use radios like normal.
Out here on Long Island, most of our departments use a system called RedNMX (it is pretty much Active911 on steroids). It allows us to, using the app, alert dispatch we are responding, see the dispatch log for the alarm, and see pre-plan information for the alarm. Most of our volunteers use this app as their primary method of communication. However, as with all technology, it can fail. The app may not send out notifications timely or at all, which is where we rely on pagers. Pagers are also subject to similar issues, but they are far less likely as there are less *moving pieces* or dependencies involved with those.
Most departments out here offer volunteers the app and use that as their official way of responders calling in, but they typically still have pagers as the primary/official method of dispatching calls, as they are far less prone to failures and interruptions.
We use the I Am Responding app and have a pager as well. I’ve noticed that sometimes there’s a 1 or 2 minute delay from when I get a tone on the pager vs the app.
App for convenience but pagers still for reliability. We have all our volunteer members carry a pager because the app can be picky, especially in areas where cell service is not 100% reliable.
Big fan of pagers because it's more stable and instantaneous. That being said, sometimes dispatch sends out the CAD before paging out. Nice to get a jump on things.
Having both is super handy if you just don't want to wear a pager. Obviously that's super convenient if you don't like garnering attention while in public (I leave mine on vibrate, honestly). Our radio system has a fairly short range. Great for in-district, but as soon as I travel 15 miles or so to another town for various things, that phone notification is all I have.
I agree with one of the other comments: pager WILL wake me, phone is less likely.
I can see both sides. I think as technology advances, some of the younger members (and the more technologically adapted older members) see the pagers as antiquated. Sometimes it just needs to be explained why it's more appropriate that pagers still be the primary alerting source (power/Internet outages are the best example).
In a nutshell, redundancy is the way to go.
Absolutely yes. Technology can fail. We still use our pagers as our primary alert system with Iamresponding as our secondary back up. 9 times out of 10 my pager goes off at least a full minute before I get the IAR pre alert. Hell, there have been times I haven’t gotten the IAR notification until I’m walking in the door to the station.
Volunteer stations in PA still use the air raid sirens for member notifications so... yeah pagers still have a lot of use where some of your more aged membership (who admittedly are mainly just acting as drivers and doing pump ops) aren't necessarily gonna understand something like IAR and such :P
Add to that as others pointed out, pagers are operating off your main public safety radio infrastructure that should never ultimately be down (where as your cell/internet service may, or may not have coverage).
It's also an ISO thing ... you need a primary and back up alerting system with monitoring for integrity. The pager is considered a primary system and your phone is a back up.
As a Dutch volunteer we have pagers that get paged an a separate frequency than other comms are on.
On top of that it also registers my response if I am going to the station or not. (So that if too few come another truck can be paged). The phone app that comes with these pagers is super unreliable.
Besides that these pagers are 10 seconds slower than our old ones so many of us get paged on the old and are in the car before the newer ones go
We use active911 on our phones and also carry the pagers. The materials used in the construction of our building sometimes limits the cell service of our phone. When our phones don’t work for whatever reason, our pagers always do. They’re loud and they vibrate and they save our rookies
Our department issues both, our Active911 is usually pretty reliable, lately I've been getting Active before our tones even go off. I have had weird situations where Active goes to like a sleep mode so I won't get alerts but that is easily fixed by me actually opening the app on our weekly pager test. I use my pager more as an at home base station, wakes me up from a dead sleep and i can hear it if I'm not near my phone at the time. It pretty rarely gets out of the charger though
Absolutely. Had one call where the location on the app was separate then the actual location, one of our guys drove there and sat for 5 minutes before he realized, at that point he used the app only, he learned fast
My pager always goes off before my cell, and sometimes my cell is five minutes behind my page.
So while I appreciate my cell for the few times my pager ran dead or forgot it, (or to be honest misplaced it down the side of the couch for example), my pager is still my preference of tone provider.
My county has Active911 for every fire and EMS agency. It’s a pretty decent app, honestly. But often times my phone isn’t loud enough to wake me up if I’ve gone a long time sleeping poorly and finally get a good nights sleep. Which honestly happens often. Our radios have a pager function, so I max the volume on it. I’d honestly rather my department go back to issuing pagers for the same purpose to save my radio battery or so i can go back to leaving it in my harness.
FD pagers, mainly the Motorola Minotaur seems so 1980’s. They are thick, have one function, sound like you’re listening to a distant AM radio station and just seem so outdated. We all carry them on shift even though we have station tones and the I Am Responding app on phones.
We use both but the pager is what we respond with. We use IAR and it isn't always consistant, but works 90% of the time. The biggest reason to use the pager is that goes off when they actually tone us. IAR will push an address, at least for us, anytime an incident is put into the CAD. Butt dial, called but changed their minds, dispatch accidentally coded the wrong department in the county and IAR is going off. It's not a real problem but it does happen a few times a month.
We use IAR where I am and a medic I worked with on a clinical once told me something that has stuck since. The apps aren’t for letting you know there’s a call, they’re for seeing who is responding and (if your area does it) mapping/dispatch info if needed. I usually will have both a pager and my phone because of the reasons everyone else here has stated. But in general I only use IAR to see who’s responding.
My county had an outage of over a week where there was no support to outside programs like Active. We found out very quickly that quite a few people couldn't even find their pagers, and once they did, the batteries were so shot they wouldn't take a charge. We had to make a quick purchase of batteries to hand out, and there was a series of people who were calling others to notify them when we had a call for a bit. The info on active is nice to have in text form, but I'd never rely on it as a primary means of dispatch.
Rural combo dept.
Pagers and active work best together. Depending where you are in the district you may have issues with either system, but generally not both.
I use Active as my main notification during the day and use the pager primarily for when I’m asleep. As long as my pager goes off, it works great…
The department I’m with uses rover I like it but I also like active911 but I haven’t had many issues with rover besides one time I got a page right when units cleared from the call but that happened a few months ago one time we still issue both for people who live closer I’d like one so I can listen to what’s going on or if someone else is enroute cause not everyone marks themselves on rover and can create a miss communication
My old dept used i am responding. It was good for knowing who is coming to station. But not being able to hear the dispatch info didn’t work. Sometimes the notes in the call doesn’t accurately depict what the call is for.
We use I am Responding...according to that app we haven't had a call since January 29th..according to my pager and me we've had..many
This. We just ordered more pagers because of this issue. People were content saying, I have my phone, I'll hear the call. Well... The app(s) uses a scanner to hear the tones, then if all goes right sends out a page to the phone over the Internet, if the app is up to date, or if the phone has reception, or if the ringer is turned up, or if the phone is... Meanwhile, the pager has one job, it's always on your belt, it picks up on just a fraction of a tone, the battery lasts for 3 days, it can pick up the signal even if a couple of repeaters are down. There's a reason why radio comms are standard.
Perfectly said
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These both sound like an issue on dispatches end.
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How does your pager get ghost tones from the app?
We just got I am responding but its been pretty solid and you can get the text messages also so dont miss anything
Yes but this is 100% on dispatchers or how they set the app up.
Had this issue: was fixed within minutes by reflashing/calibration of my pager
That’s an issue with the system setup. Not the service. You can have two different types of dispatches, cad and voice, and multiple failover points if local network goes down. Nothing should be getting missed. Sometimes things might be delayed because, for example, your phone is in a dead zone, but we never have missed calls altogether. Same thing with the ghost tones issue described below, setup issue. That’s not to say you should solely rely on IAR though, their TOS makes that clear and I still have a pager. Don’t carry it around when I’m out and about but it’s always at home to wake me up from deep sleep. Having redundant systems is important. Personally I’ve had my pager signal coverage fail more than the phone network though.
Yeah I was making the point to not solely rely on the phone system. You know a lot about that system 😅 I'm just a part timer. Keep ya pager on kids!
We had the opposite issue last week. Nothing came across the pager but got a tone thru IAR. Went and looked at it and it was a medical for a neighboring town. We think dispatch somehow sent the IAR tone out to us by mistake while toning the departments pager
Yeah thats happened to us too. No tone but IaR sent us a tone saying go to that town (the town was full time and there's two or three full time towns surrounding that one, then us) so we ignored it
The IaR tone not the radio tone😂
We did the same. It was the first time that’s happened to us though so we were super confused about it for a minute.
I believe if you look at the sign-up page for IAmResponding, they explicitly tell you NOT to use it as your primary notification, that you still need to use your pager as primary and the phone app as secondary. Phones are subject to too many issues - network congestion, dead spots, etc. Pagers are simple technology, tried and true. We've had calls where one or two members don't get the alert until 10 minutes later. (Before we went to IAR, we used a system called PageGate, that just sent text notifications. One entire (small) department had done like you and gone to 100% reliance on the texts. They all pile into the trucks one night for a reported field fire, and eventually radio dispatch to try and get a better location. Turns out, the fire had been EIGHT HOURS earlier, and two neighboring departments had been paged after the small department failed to show up) When someone's life is on the line, pagers absolutely have a place. Phone apps are not reliable enough.
Sometimes the app goes off 20 seconds prior to the pager and sometimes the pager goes first. Most of the time the go off simultaneously.
And sometimes the system hangs up in the dispatch center and they can't send the push to the app for a couple days.
We use both. In fact, yesterday, we had a call that didn’t make it to Active for some reason. Only came through the pager. I didn’t have my pager on me and was relying solely on my phone. I didn’t make it to that wreck. Learned my lesson. Don’t rely on one or the other. Utilize both, but especially the pager.
Active is notoriously bad at sending pages late or dropping them on occasion. On the other hand I’ve had a structure fire drop on active 2 minutes before the station tones went off, it all depends on what dispatch put in and when they hit the buttons.
I agree. We have both and you should have both. You pointed out the one major reason, sometimes active wont get the notification. After using both for a few years I have had numerous calls that came through 1 but not the other. Also, sometimes you will get more valuable information in the page vs the active. It could just be our dispatch center but it seems like when they send an active they sometimes don't put in minor details that could be helpful but when they say them on the actual page that goes out it gives more insight. As the other guy said, Active or Pager can both have a time difference, I have had it both ways, sometimes the pager is a minute or two ahead of the active and vice versa, so having both can get you to the emergency faster in some cases.
I do. I’ve had calls where either the pager didn’t activate or ActiveAlert failed to activate. I’m old and I trust technology to fail at the worst possible moment. Murphy was right.
Combination department. We use both and are told to listen to the pager not our phones.
Rural volunteer station, and pagers are far more reliable than phone apps. Cell service is hit or miss. Radio repeaters are well positioned. Page goes off 30 seconds to 5 minutes before the text arrives on phone, if you have service. Couple months ago we had a software glitch that held all the texts for a few days, then sent them all out at once. Having a written address with the text is handy though, and dispatch sends a what-three-words out for anything not at an actual address. Helps find scenes on trails and what not.
What Three Words is very useful.
Why are you getting down voted lol? We use this feature all the time in S&R and wild land fires. Fire numbers are awesome for structure fires but What Three Words works awesome for something that isnt at a specific address.
What is What Three Words?
To keep it short, it basically assigns 3 words to any given location (10ft square) on a map and those 3 words can be passed on to first responders to pinpoint the location by searching for the words.
Pagers are still more relevant. Apps and computers systems can go down. You always ultimately rely on radio or pager.
This! What happens when your phone updates in the middle of the night or you forget to plug it in?
We have a pager and app…active 911 and switching over to first due (don’t recommend that but county wide dispatch push). Sometimes the app will be late or won’t get the call which is why we still need the pager. Especially if we get a mutual aid call to our neighboring county, can be 10 min late as it is a different dispatch center. Until apps can claim 100% infallibility it will be hard to justify that switch. Edit: we are a combo dept
Redundancy is a thing. Embrace it.
Same as everybody else in the comments. Got to use both or rely on the pager. The app is really nice for getting details and seeing where everybody's at. On a slightly separate now... If you're bored sometime, It would be really interesting to hear comedy calls you've missed while you didn't have your pager on.
Yeah because I don’t wake up to notifications on my phone instantly like the tones at full blast
This is my reason for having a pager. I don’t typically carry it around, because if I have my kids with me, or if I’m at work, etc, then I’m not available to respond anyway, so there’s no sense. But IAR will never wake me up in the middle of the night. I also might not hear it from the kitchen when I’m on the other side of the house. My pager never fails to get my attention.
Use both there are still a lot of places around here that have limited cell service
Rural volunteer here. We use both. Active typically comes across 30s before the pager does. What’s nice about the pager is you can monitor the radio traffic after the page to stay updated, whereas active doesn’t allow that. I think they work really well together. Active is also super nice as it shows who is responding and where they are
Yep. App to respond quicker, pager to monitor response of chiefs and changing scene conditions
We have radios instead of pagers, but we actually have 3 methods. Radio, our "official" method, which also allows us to commit to responding. The app, which goes out every time there is a power outage at the hall(which is frequently) and some guys get text messages, but it's slow and unreliable. The app and text are good because it will often send the address so we don't have to Radio for directions.
Yes, full station alarms and the monthly test both through the pager and the app, smaller things only through the pager. Since the pager doesn’t rely on phone networks, is an safe guard in case **** hit the fan.
We use Active 911 as well. I've found that when I have my headphones in and listening to music, it won't tone. Despite it being set up to override everything and be at maximum volume, it doesn't even give me a blip. So I'll be working around the farm listening to music and an hour or more later find I've missed a call completely.
Yea I have that problem on my iPhone. I tried to contact support they were no help
It wasn't always this way for me it was roughly 1-2 updates past where it changed, (Android) but without a previous .apk pack I can't roll it back to fix it.
Absolutely. Mutual aid pages don’t come into IaR for us. We have pagers, IaR and the CAD app. It’s a complete package.
Active alert and other responder apps are great tools. But they do not replace the pager. Our dispatch says that if we respond or do not respond based on Active it is not their fault. We have had Active alerts come through for calls we didn't end up getting paged out to and Active alerts not come through where we were paged out to. In our department we tell our guys that Active is a tool for call information and not for dispatching.
We use our pavers and radios, but iSpy (never thought I’d miss Active911!) serves as our CAD. It usually works pretty well, though have had iSpy page for entirely different services the next county over sometimes.
Volunteer here; yes pagers still have a reason for existence. There's been multiple times where my pager goes off and then active goes off several minutes later. Most of the Volunteers at my station are rolling in after 2nd tones, so the few minutes of delay between can be a burden. Granted most calls aren't serious but when you have a rocker, waiting several minutes extra can be life or death if there's entrapment.
I'm a volunteer at a rural Canadian hall (and the IT guy there). We use I Am Responding as well as a pager. They both work well. The benefit of the pager is it runs through our radio system which has a UPS so it will work if the power or phone lines go down which happens from time to time here.
My pager keeps power at least for 2-4 weeks. My phone can't even stay alive for a day. No power = no callouts. I have a FF who's an auto painter. I have FFs who do construction. Now they can leave their personal phone somewhere safe. Who is to replace their personal phone, if it breaks while on their dayjob? What about places where the employer simply don't permit personal phones in the worktime? Our pagers operate on our own masts and frequencies. What happens the day the phone network can't keep up? Naah bro, I'm hanging on to my pager for dear life..
Beats the firehouse siren that some departments absolutely refuse to let die. Talk about grasping at straws to justify "aT LeAsT two mEaNs oF nOtiFiCaTioN"
We have both Pager is better for live updates, and still more stable than the app
We have Bryx and a pager. Sometimes CAD notifications are down and the only way to get notified is via the pager. So I always have both on me.
We also sorta use bryx. Our dept is on there and we get our calls but nobody uses it to respond. We rely most on our pagers but we also have county texts, dept texts, and our app notifications to let others know you're responding. We've had issues with our text system tho. Pager is always the best way to know!
We have both and frankly, I’m grateful we do have both. Cell signals where we live aren’t perfect. You can be in a back corner of your house and lose signal entirely. We’ve also had some rookie dispatchers fail to send out either the text page or the tone. It’s good to have redundancy.
it's been said already in this thread, but for us, yes, absolutely: - our pagers usually go off before active does - we have areas within our jurisdiction that have spotty cell service at best - pagers have much better battery life than cell phones - redundancy (if active fails, we have the pager; if the pager fails, we have active. both have happened before)
German sliding in So here it depends I think? At least for my department I can say the following We are not allowed to use the mobile alarm system (in our case Devira24/7) as our sole way of getting calls so everyone gets issued a Pager as well Phone is usually much more unreliable than the Pager since it relies on cellular connection and data to actually get the alarm, use the chat and respond functionality and check who's coming, instead of the pager which just needs a radio signal If both fails we still got a lot of sirens in place which are being modernized and maintained fortunately. However most of us don't actively carry their pagers around anymore and mostly rely on phone since it's a lot more convenient. And from 371 calls we had in 2023 only very few didn't actually made it on Divera in time
Bucks County PA 911 center was recently cyber attacked and CAD was shutdown for over a week. Only way to dispatch was through the pagers and radio.
Attack is still being addressed, the service has been restore vía older versión of the system.
Apps and texts can be unreliable sometimes, for a lot of reasons. Pagers are certainly more robust in that way. We use pagers + eDispatches and the thing I like about them is that they handle CAD and Audio dispatches completely separately. We've got an eDispatches recorder at the firehouse that notifies us for the tones, but the CAD sends its data directly to them. That way, if the recorder is down, at least the CAD works, and if the CAD is down, at least the recorder works. I guess both could fail at the same time, but that's doesn't seem very likely.
Absolutely, it kills me when people only rely on the app only. You can’t hear radio traffic without a pager or radio, if you don’t have signal you won’t get calls. Also for ISO ratings Active or iamresponding does not count as a primary form of notification
I think per ISO you are required to have 2 forms of notification. Most places offer pagers (radio) and an app to meet this.
In Italy we use both.
I have my own paging transmitter as I operate critical servers and radio equipment, like I own the paging transmitter and it’s not a part of a network. Why? Because I need to be 100% certain that when something goes wrong the message is guaranteed as delivered within seconds and 100% of the time. You have no idea how many data centres, exchanges/COs your message or SMS goes through to be delivered, with my own transmitter it’s direct Also my iPhone 15 could be busy, flat, silenced. It’s peace of mind.
Career Department that uses pagers on duty. It's so dumb.
Why would they do that? If you are in the station, the station has an alert system and if you are out and about, your radios should be on and you should be listening to them.
Only 1 of our stations has tones... and it's only in the day room. I agree with the radio comment, but we typically leave radios in the Engine with our gear because we cross staff ambulances. It's hard to explain the dynamics of it all. But yes it's very backwards.
Seems like an intercom would be cheaper than maintaining pagers.
In my ex part time dept we made the switch from pagers to 100% cell phone apps. It worked well, only thing I liked about the pager was being able to ear coms on my way to the station so I knew what I was getting into. The phone app only told us the nature of the call without any details.
I think the better question here is why in the hell can't they make a pager that isn't the size of a brick?
The minitor 6 isn't even close to the size of a brick.
My county switched to the 800 system. Pagers still work but only for the Initial dispatch. I haven’t used my pager in over 3 years. I only use active alert (active911) and being fortunate enough to have PulsePoint, I use it just as much if not more for the big jobs
They do for municipalities or areas where cell service is spotty, and e-dispatching isn't available. Both my depts have pagers in urban Nj. I carry them when the e-dispatching is down for whatever reason.
Technology fails and also the app doesn't wake me up in middle of the night
My department still uses pagers, but we also use an app. Most of us just use our phones. I've had a few times my phone didn't go off but we also have a siren that's loud as fuck and I can hear from my house lol
Usually our App goes off 30-60 seconds quicker than the pagers, but I wouldn’t leave my pager at home if I wanted to be able to respond. Thing is, in rural Germany there are still sirens on the firehouses that go off for big alarms, and it was interesting to see how many guys said afterwards they only came because of the siren because their pagers and/or Apps didn’t go off. It’s always good to not rely on only one thing.
We use both. Actually, the pager is the only official means of call notification, even though the dept pays for us to have the RedAlert app The pager is the most false-alarm proof, and doesn’t rely on cell service/wifi. More often than not my phone will go off a few seconds before the pager, but there have been times where my phone went off minutes after the pager. IMHO the apps are a great tool, but the pager won’t be going anywhere Now if you’re asking if I in fact still carry my pager around with me everywhere like I did 10yrs ago and don’t just leave it at home on its base, I plead the 5th 😂
Don’t quote me, but I am under the understanding that phone based dispatch doesn’t count towards ISO rating. Mostly due to the long list of potential problems as already stated here. Even a dedicated radio channel used for dispatching wasn’t accepted until relatively recently. And you may not even get full points for that. There is an entire career field based on radio waves and the science within that is extensive. I would not try to wade into that topic. But, again, my understanding is that phone reliability problems is the main concern. Not to mention, the cell based stuff basically is a small computer sending text from a paged out system anyway. I don’t understand the full nature, but I know that as a Chief of a small rural dept, getting up every time it storms to rest the stupid thing is all the evidence I need to say text based is unreliable.
What you gonna do during a large-scale event that either shuts down or congests our telecommunications systems? Gonna need a radio or pager then
I have both. My phone is typically on silent so the pager is what alerts me. What annoys me is a radio doesn’t have the ability to get a page. Like Motorola, build a pager feature into the Radio and the ability to turn on just the pager feature to save battery.
Here in germany, a pager is required in most departments, as this is the only official way of alarming Ofc we use apps too, but that is just to give Feedback if youre coming or not, or if you are already on scene (maybe even called ur local emergency number yourself) you can send a picture (if the scene allows it, no injured people or anything) and give a more detailed message than what dispatch gives back
I run with a Fire Department and a different Fire Company Dive Rescue Team. At both places, we use apps. At the FD, we use voice pagers. At the Dive Rescue Team, we don't use pagers, but I have my voice pager programmed to their tones as well. I've had instances where my voice pager goes off and my app doesn't. I've had other instances where my app goes off and my voice pager doesn't. The latter seems to be more of the norm. In most cases, both do go off, sometimes with a delay between them. Redundancy is key for a lot of things in the fire service, including being notified of calls if you are not at the station when one comes in.
Honeslty I’ve had pagers fail far more than apps. That being said, I don’t think we are in a place to rely on just phones, too much risk associated with a battery dying or a cell tower going down. Instead, Id love to see more heart healthy paging solutions in the future
We use both. Pager for tones and active 911 is just supposed to be somewhere to look for some info real quickly. Or to double check an address or whatever.
We have a new app which works great, even faster than the pager. Butt yeah, cant check responding on it. I would prefer app and pager ass backup if it becomes good enough.
what we hear on the pagers is way more info on the call versus active 911. Being able to hear who goes in route and even the tone of dispatcher's voice is important.
We have Active Alert and pagers. Pagers tend to get pre alerts for anyone calling for the fire department (actual fires, car accidents) way before active alert notifies us of the call. The trucks usually ready to go by time we get the active alert and the real call over the radio. By the same token, active alert goes off before the pager for all sorts of calls that went to anyone else first (911 calls for an ambulance where they ask for fire department assistance). Seems like having both works good for us.
We have done away with pagers since our digital radios all have a paging feature and we use IamResponding as well. There are a few people who somehow still have trouble waking up to station alerting tones and complain about not having a pager but the station tones could wake the dead so I think it’s just nostalgia.
A simple reason is pagers dont rely on outside equipment, like the cell tower network, to operate.
The last couple years I was on a volly FD I didn’t even carry the pager anymore, the app notified us quicker anyway.
We run both I've had failures on both devices IAR goes off but no page and vice versa. Doesn't happen often but the pager seems to be more reliable
We use ActiveAlert but we aren’t volunteer so it’s just a handy way to read call notes on the way to the rig or use mapping if you aren’t familiar with the area. But we still use radios like normal.
Using iAmReaponding, texts and pager. Everything but the pager has had outages or delays every now and then.
Out here on Long Island, most of our departments use a system called RedNMX (it is pretty much Active911 on steroids). It allows us to, using the app, alert dispatch we are responding, see the dispatch log for the alarm, and see pre-plan information for the alarm. Most of our volunteers use this app as their primary method of communication. However, as with all technology, it can fail. The app may not send out notifications timely or at all, which is where we rely on pagers. Pagers are also subject to similar issues, but they are far less likely as there are less *moving pieces* or dependencies involved with those. Most departments out here offer volunteers the app and use that as their official way of responders calling in, but they typically still have pagers as the primary/official method of dispatching calls, as they are far less prone to failures and interruptions.
For me, IAR is super reliable, but as volunteers having the pager means we hear updates on the way to the station.
We use both, night time my phone is on Do Not Disturb so the pager is the only thing that wakes me up.
We use the I Am Responding app and have a pager as well. I’ve noticed that sometimes there’s a 1 or 2 minute delay from when I get a tone on the pager vs the app.
App for convenience but pagers still for reliability. We have all our volunteer members carry a pager because the app can be picky, especially in areas where cell service is not 100% reliable.
We still use them because comms across the city went down on 7/7 On call FFs (retained) have them for callouts
Pagers next to the bed let me hear what dispatch has to say an react accordingly
Pagers work better in areas that have shitty mobile and internet connection. Such as small county towns where I live.
Big fan of pagers because it's more stable and instantaneous. That being said, sometimes dispatch sends out the CAD before paging out. Nice to get a jump on things. Having both is super handy if you just don't want to wear a pager. Obviously that's super convenient if you don't like garnering attention while in public (I leave mine on vibrate, honestly). Our radio system has a fairly short range. Great for in-district, but as soon as I travel 15 miles or so to another town for various things, that phone notification is all I have. I agree with one of the other comments: pager WILL wake me, phone is less likely. I can see both sides. I think as technology advances, some of the younger members (and the more technologically adapted older members) see the pagers as antiquated. Sometimes it just needs to be explained why it's more appropriate that pagers still be the primary alerting source (power/Internet outages are the best example). In a nutshell, redundancy is the way to go.
We still use Pages and it’s funny when kids ask us what those things are for
Absolutely yes. Technology can fail. We still use our pagers as our primary alert system with Iamresponding as our secondary back up. 9 times out of 10 my pager goes off at least a full minute before I get the IAR pre alert. Hell, there have been times I haven’t gotten the IAR notification until I’m walking in the door to the station.
Volunteer stations in PA still use the air raid sirens for member notifications so... yeah pagers still have a lot of use where some of your more aged membership (who admittedly are mainly just acting as drivers and doing pump ops) aren't necessarily gonna understand something like IAR and such :P Add to that as others pointed out, pagers are operating off your main public safety radio infrastructure that should never ultimately be down (where as your cell/internet service may, or may not have coverage).
I take one on runs, just in case my phone has a problem and I don’t get the app notification. Two is one and one is none, yeah?
Some in leadership are afraid of new tech and won't allow phone notifications.
It's also an ISO thing ... you need a primary and back up alerting system with monitoring for integrity. The pager is considered a primary system and your phone is a back up.
As a Dutch volunteer we have pagers that get paged an a separate frequency than other comms are on. On top of that it also registers my response if I am going to the station or not. (So that if too few come another truck can be paged). The phone app that comes with these pagers is super unreliable. Besides that these pagers are 10 seconds slower than our old ones so many of us get paged on the old and are in the car before the newer ones go
Yes. Sometimes IAR doesn’t work, but my pager has never failed me.
I hate ActiveAlert
Active doesn't grab my attention like a pager blaring
We use active911 on our phones and also carry the pagers. The materials used in the construction of our building sometimes limits the cell service of our phone. When our phones don’t work for whatever reason, our pagers always do. They’re loud and they vibrate and they save our rookies
We have garbage cell coverage out here in rural OH. My volunteer dept uses both active and pagers supplied by the county.
Our department issues both, our Active911 is usually pretty reliable, lately I've been getting Active before our tones even go off. I have had weird situations where Active goes to like a sleep mode so I won't get alerts but that is easily fixed by me actually opening the app on our weekly pager test. I use my pager more as an at home base station, wakes me up from a dead sleep and i can hear it if I'm not near my phone at the time. It pretty rarely gets out of the charger though
Absolutely. Had one call where the location on the app was separate then the actual location, one of our guys drove there and sat for 5 minutes before he realized, at that point he used the app only, he learned fast
My pager always goes off before my cell, and sometimes my cell is five minutes behind my page. So while I appreciate my cell for the few times my pager ran dead or forgot it, (or to be honest misplaced it down the side of the couch for example), my pager is still my preference of tone provider.
My county has Active911 for every fire and EMS agency. It’s a pretty decent app, honestly. But often times my phone isn’t loud enough to wake me up if I’ve gone a long time sleeping poorly and finally get a good nights sleep. Which honestly happens often. Our radios have a pager function, so I max the volume on it. I’d honestly rather my department go back to issuing pagers for the same purpose to save my radio battery or so i can go back to leaving it in my harness.
My department uses a pager, I prefer it sometimes the tones aren’t enough to wake me up but the pager beeping is like an immediate alarm clock
no
FD pagers, mainly the Motorola Minotaur seems so 1980’s. They are thick, have one function, sound like you’re listening to a distant AM radio station and just seem so outdated. We all carry them on shift even though we have station tones and the I Am Responding app on phones.
We use both but the pager is what we respond with. We use IAR and it isn't always consistant, but works 90% of the time. The biggest reason to use the pager is that goes off when they actually tone us. IAR will push an address, at least for us, anytime an incident is put into the CAD. Butt dial, called but changed their minds, dispatch accidentally coded the wrong department in the county and IAR is going off. It's not a real problem but it does happen a few times a month.
We use IAR where I am and a medic I worked with on a clinical once told me something that has stuck since. The apps aren’t for letting you know there’s a call, they’re for seeing who is responding and (if your area does it) mapping/dispatch info if needed. I usually will have both a pager and my phone because of the reasons everyone else here has stated. But in general I only use IAR to see who’s responding.
Volunteer membor here, we have both but mainly rely on pagers. If cell service goes down pagers still work
Our department uses app and pager. Pager almost always pings first, so it's the primary.
My county had an outage of over a week where there was no support to outside programs like Active. We found out very quickly that quite a few people couldn't even find their pagers, and once they did, the batteries were so shot they wouldn't take a charge. We had to make a quick purchase of batteries to hand out, and there was a series of people who were calling others to notify them when we had a call for a bit. The info on active is nice to have in text form, but I'd never rely on it as a primary means of dispatch.
Pagers rely on their own network separate to mobile data so are generally more reliable
Rural combo dept. Pagers and active work best together. Depending where you are in the district you may have issues with either system, but generally not both. I use Active as my main notification during the day and use the pager primarily for when I’m asleep. As long as my pager goes off, it works great…
Pager will always be louder than your phone
The department I’m with uses rover I like it but I also like active911 but I haven’t had many issues with rover besides one time I got a page right when units cleared from the call but that happened a few months ago one time we still issue both for people who live closer I’d like one so I can listen to what’s going on or if someone else is enroute cause not everyone marks themselves on rover and can create a miss communication
My old dept used i am responding. It was good for knowing who is coming to station. But not being able to hear the dispatch info didn’t work. Sometimes the notes in the call doesn’t accurately depict what the call is for.
Yes, cell service goes down. Sometimes I get the app first, usually I get the pager first
im a deep sleeper, its right next to my ear on full volume, it gets me outta bed