Never Miss A
Fire Lead!
25 July, 2013
Posted by John Niewiecki
Never miss a fire lead! How to hear and record simultaneous transmissions from your fire scanner
So now you are listening to your fire scanner and enjoying the benefit of knowing what is happening in your local area, and on occasion you get a lead and close the business. You are probably noticing though that listening and catching an address can be tough. You may also be noticing that there are events in your territory that you should know are happening but miss no less.
How can this be? You know your programming is correct and you know the parameters of your reception, so how can you be missing fire leads?
Each county and sometimes even the cities and towns that comprise it have multiple fire frequencies. This is due to the fact that there could potentially be a number of discussions happening at the same time. If your scanner has twenty fire frequencies programmed into it, these are available for a number of different discussions. If you are listening for fire leads long enough, you likely noticed that not many are dispatches for fire, smoke, or water damage.
In fact, about 85 – 90% of all transmissions across fire scanners are not dispatches. Many times they are calls for emergency medical incidents or chatter between departments. When it is time to grow your restoration business, the first key is to capture all of the dispatches, or at least as many as possible.
How can this be done? With so much chatter and so few leads, what can a restoration company do to capture all those fire transitions happening at the same time?
Multiple scanners scanning the same set of fire frequencies will solve this problem. There are a number of ways this can be done, either through simple configuration of your fire scanners by putting a subset of fire frequencies into each scanner to more advanced technology such as Multisync. Either technique will allow for simultaneous transmissions to be captured by your scanners, and if you are recording, give you a chance to go back in time and capture leads even if you do not hear them the first time around.