Radios, Telephones, and Pagers

Radios

If your facility is currently using radios, these same radios may also be used with the CISCOR system. There will be no need to purchase any additional or special hand held two way radios. For the majority of applications, hand held two way radios will provide the most direct and comprehensive tool for managing alarm and event announcements. If a staff member calls out on his/her radio for help, all other staff members with radios hear the request and any other staff person can respond immediately by radio that they are on the way.

Hand held two way radios allow staff members to acknowledge alarms with their own personal ID number or to patch to intercom stations, open doors, turn on lights and other vital control functions. Voice alarm messages from the computer are repeated to the hand held two way radios every 15 seconds until a staff member acknowledges the alarm. This provides accountability on the part of staff persons and thus reduces liability and exposure for the facility. Radios will prove to be extremely useful for a variety of reasons beyond the CISCOR alarm system such as locating staff persons or dispatching maintenance.

Telephones

Portable telephones come in three varieties, and the DEVI 9000 software by CISCOR supports all of them.

Monthly fee based cellular phones
The proprietary (private, on site) cell phone system
Stand alone wireless telephones

The CISCOR system can call any phone number and announce the synthesized voice message once the telephone answers. If the phone is busy, the computer will retry a programmable number of times. When the CISCOR computer is dialing into an on site portable telephone system or into a facility telephone system, it can display any user defined message in the caller ID window of the receiving telephones.

Any staff person who answers the telephone call will hear a user defined computer generated voice message describing the alarm condition. The staff person may activate other functions by using touch tones on the telephone including acknowledging the alarm thus making a record that they are the responding party. To call for additional help, the staff person must call one telephone at a time until they find someone who is free to provide assistance (except for proprietary cell phone systems which have an all call feature).

In this regard, radios have an advantage over telephones. A hand held radio does not require that the staff person do any dialing to access the computer or other staff members. By simply pressing the transmit button on a hand held two way radio, all staff members hear the call for assistance simultaneously. In addition, area wide cell phones are a re-occurring monthly expense.

Proprietary on site cell telephones (such as you would see being used in a large hardware store and manufactured by Lucent, Erickson, Spectrum etc.) will perform all functions available with hand held two way radios but are expensive costing 5 or 6 times more than a radio system.

Stand alone portable 900 MHz (megahertz) and 2.4 GHz (gigahertz) telephones (like you might purchase for your home) will work in a small facility but they are limited by the FCC to low power output. Hand held two way radios are 5 times more powerful and base radios, which announce alarms, are 40 times more powerful. For very large areas, repeaters can be added to a two way radio system dramatically increasing the range. Therefore, a common problem with stand alone portable telephones is dead spots. This will not occur with radios.

Telephones do have their place. Portable telephones are more inexpensive than radios and so they are a good fit for smaller facilities that do not require expansive coverage and with no more than one or two responding personnel on duty at a time.

Pagers

The CISCOR system will also support alphanumeric pagers in addition to radios or telephones or instead of radios and telephones. Pagers only provide one way communication so it is not possible to acknowledge an alarm from a pager. They do not allow staff members to communicate among themselves for the purpose of determining who will respond to an alarm or to request help in an emergency.

Pagers are useful as a secondary means of announcing alarms and might be used to alert management or other interested non-responding staff persons.