Siren scanner...

[Rheems1]

To explain further, the first thing you need is a 2 way radio capable of transmitting in the frequency range for your Siratrol AND the frequency for the Siratrol to be programmed into the radio. This is not an off the shelf item you are going to find at Radio Shack generally, this would be something that you would purchase from a government surplus auction or from a fire/EMS department. I say generally because I don't know what frequency your Siratrol works off of, most of the time you will find they are programmed to receive somewhere in the 154 MHz band but that isn't a guarantee.. here in Pa the Siratrol's (or other alerting devices) were set to receive on Lowband frequencies (33.90, 46.18, 46.14, ect, ect). Either way those are public safety bands for the most part, once you have the proper 2 way radio you would go into Audacity or Cool Edit Pro (my program of choice) and make the tones up...every Siratrol I have seen operate off of 2 tone sequential. For 2 tone sequential you actually need 2 tones to make it work, one played back to back... at my old department our tones were 992, 701... so to make that you would make a full tone that does 2 seconds of 992 and 2 seconds of 701 or maybe it is 1 second and 1 second.. or 1.5 seconds and 1 second.. see here is the problem with what you are doing... radio coding inside of a device can have all kinds of different timing and it listens for that timing. In Lancaster County the tones were 2 seconds and 2 seconds, but in Franklin County they are 1.5 seconds and 1.5 seconds for pagers and 1 second and .5 seconds for sirens... it listens for the length of the tones or to put it a different way it listens for a certain length for the tones... if your device is set to receive 2 seconds of the first tone and it only hears 1 second it will stop listening because what you sent didn't meet the minimum requirements to "open" the first crystal. Let's just say you figured out the timing and made your tone, next up is making it go out. As Dan and Cruz said if you somehow hit an activate system with your tones and set something off you my friend will be in big trouble.... what we used to do (because we were heartless) was to make up our station's tone than play it over the 2 way radio WITH THE ANTENNA OFF so it would hit just the in house system and nothing else. Without the antenna on the radio the transmit range is probably 2 or 3 blocks, it doesn't have enough power to find the tower to send to the whole county. In our case the in house would go off, the live ins (we were all volunteers by the way, no paid staff) would come running down and we would laugh.. but the guy who lived a few blocks away didn't come down because the signal never reached his pager. As well the siren didn't go off because the siren controller was on a whole other frequency... having said ALL of that. It is not a simple process to make your tones and find the proper radio to activate them over and furthermore it is highly illegal. When we screwed around we took a very big risk, if we screwed up a step we would send our activation tones out across the whole radio band and set off all of the pagers... the same could happen with you. If you screw up you could send your tones across a county system and set some big things off, which will land you at the very least a very, very large fine and at worst could land you in jail. It is a lot of work requiring a lot of experimenting for a very small reward (getting to hear your Siratrol click)... please keep that in mind if you are planning to do something

[Beaker74]

You guys know about the RTL-SDR's, right? USB stick, with an antanna input and with open-source software (SDR# or others). Cost of the basic hardware (the stick)? $12-$20.

http://rtlsdr.org/

[gman 1]

Would this work? http://www.banoggle.com/products/baofen ... googlebase

[Stormsetter4]

Yes the UV5R is one of the best cheap radios on the market.

[Rheems1]

As Cruz said, it will most likely work... It really depends on what channel the Siratrol receives on, that does the VHF band which covers the 154mhz range that a lot of them operate on. If it is low band though, you are out of luck sadly.

[Josh]

Would this work? http://www.banoggle.com/products/baofen ... googlebase

Yes the UV5R is one of the best cheap radios on the market.

My friend has the UV5R plus. Me and him used to listen to fire calls on it. Never used it for siren purposes as I joined the "magical world of sirens" back in November 2014, but we have plan to use it for that.

According to him the UV5R plus is better that the UV5R, how it's better I don't now.

[gman 1]

How do they work?

[Josh]

Well, I'll give a brief description, it's getting late here. Its description on Amazon Is "FM ham two-way Radio". It has a LCD screen and a key pad for entering frequencies. It has many extra programming options but you don't need to use those right away.

[gman 1]

So, if I want to listen to the fire radio, and I know the frequency, I just punch it in and listen?

EDIT: Do I need a license to own & operate one of these radios?

[Ziginox]

So, if I want to listen to the fire radio, and I know the frequency, I just punch it in and listen?

EDIT: Do I need a license to own & operate one of these radios?

Is google blocked for you or something?