Does a whelen controller work with an EOWS?

[SIRATONEOWS612]

because one of the people at Westshore services said they can't but:
here: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.1257344 ... 312!8i6656

[HudsonRiverSirens]

To add onto this, there are 2001s (I think somewhere in Illinois, but the name of the town isn't coming to me ) running Whelen controls. I could see how EOWS could run on Whelen controls because they are electronic, but 2001s? Maybe they ripped out the chopper and replaced it with a speaker LOL

[championsiren]

To add onto this, there are 2001s (I think somewhere in Illinois, but the name of the town isn't coming to me ) running Whelen controls. I could see how EOWS could run on Whelen controls because they are electronic, but 2001s? Maybe they ripped out the chopper and replaced it with a speaker LOL

I think I know what you're talking about. They may be using the MS-84 radio (I believe that's what it's called), so just the radio from a Whelen box that would activate the siren. IIRC the thunderbolts in Y-town used those.
Speaking of weird 2001s, a friend of mine found one running on sentry controls. Like full controls. Battery box, starter, and radio/timer. I wonder how that works

[07VFDInLCD]

Okay, I'm gonna need some pictures. I've seen electronic sirens running on controllers from another company, but never mechanical sirens. With the exception of the 2001s in LaPorte County running on ASC Controls.

[DJ2226]

To answer the question about a Whelen panel being able to run non-Whelen sirens, yes for the most part. Whelen doesn't officially support using their controllers on other brands of sirens, but the amps are actually built to supply 500 or 400 watts to a 2.75 - 3 ohm load. Their current amps aren't too different from the older ones that they used to power the WS/WPS-2000 series and the WS/WPS-3000 to my understanding. They had breakouts that would allow you to wire the drivers individually, but internally the connections were all bridged up in a parallel configuration. Those amps would drive the drivers at 320 watts and push them to 400 in voice. The drivers were rated for 80 watts, but they ran the same 11-ohm impedance as most of the drivers used in today's sirens. When bridged together, you'd get a 320-watt 2.75-ohm load. If a driver blows the impedance goes up, and the amp reports this back to the main logic board via a sense wire. When they made their newer amps they upped the wattage to 500 watts on the top end for voice and 400 for tone, and when they made the amps for the Vortex series, which would eventually carry into the Vortex-R/O series and eventually the OmniAlert-OA series, they stripped their power delivery down to 400 watts peak and took the driver impedance function out of the amps and added the functionality to the oscillator boards. There's only a 0.25-ohm difference between their current 3-ohm 400-watt driver and a set of four 100-watt drivers wired in parallel, and that's close enough that the amps will drive the load just fine. Their IPS panels use a breakout setup to take the output and split it four ways for each driver just like the older amps from back when they were still using 80-watt drivers with the positive and negative for each driver bridged together internally in parallel. The amps are made to handle that, and the ones in the IPS panels are identical to the ones in the Type II and III panels. A Whelen panel can practically run any omnidirectional siren head so long as the wires are connected as they would be with one of their older sirens or with an IPS panel.

Where you might run into problems is when you try this with a rotating siren and want to retain two-way capabilities. If I'm not mistaken, there is an output on the logic board that sends a 5VDC signal to the oscillator board during tone operation. You could probably hijack that output and send it to a relay that could power a rotator motor directly. Up until about a year or so ago, there was an active tone-only WS-2000R being run on a newer Type II panel with an ESC-2020 560 Hz logic board. That version of the 2000R is a true rotating siren, so if it can be done with one of those, it can probably be done with something like an EOWS-612 or RE-1600 once you rewire the drivers in a parallel configuration. The later model EOWS-612s also had indexable rotators so in theory you could possibly even wire them directly to the oscillator board and just leave the switching relays and the limit switches for the direction switching out of the equation.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMRgGRiATXk



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g8ToX6shfg

[nvanw27]

Okay, I'm gonna need some pictures. I've seen electronic sirens running on controllers from another company, but never mechanical sirens. With the exception of the 2001s in LaPorte County running on ASC Controls.

The only ASC Controls that LaPorte County has on their 2001s are ASC Compulert radios. Nearby Porter County uses all ASC Controls on their 2001s.

Mechanical siren controls aren't proprietary. Any mechanical siren can use any mechanical siren controller due to most of the modern ones all being manufactured the same way. It's pretty common.

[SentrySterling]

I Don't know if this helps but there are a few 2001-DC's in Pittsburg, KS that have Whelen cabinets like this one.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3928041 ... 312!8i6656

[matthewwatson]

I’m guessing Those 2001s most likely have an ms-864
the ms-864 is a mechanical siren controller produced by whelen so that it would be easier to integrate old electromechanical sirens and new whelen sirens
The controller had a tone timer, motor starter, and whelen decoder

Here’s a picture of an MS-864