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Word activated alarm for Fire/EMS

Hi

I'm hoping someone could lead me in the right direction on this, if there is one.

I work in Fire and EMS and a common issue throughout the industry is the need to have someone actively monitoring radio traffic at all times to listen for their department to get called to an incident ("city ambulance, you are needed to respond to a priority 1 full arrest at 123 main street"). In some areas, this is alleviated by dispatch pushing a button that "tones" a specific department. These tones then trigger an alarm/bell at that specific station which is then followed by the related radio traffic in ( ) above. Unfortunately the tones are not available in all areas.

What I would like to find/build, is a device that can listen to the radio traffic for certain keywords (like the name of the specific ambulance service or fire department) which in turn would trigger an alarm or bell.

Is this possible?

Thanks!

Chris
 
I've worked in the alarm industry for decades, and our greatest service problem has always been false alarms (sometimes called "false positives"). It's easy to make and install equipment to detect intrusion and smoke/heat/fire/gas---it's much much harder to make a system and components that detect ONLY intrusion or fire/gas.

I have no doubt somebody could devise a way to monitor radio traffic for keywords that would be in a request for service from a specific source---but ask yourself how often those keywords get used in a non-request context. I can't give examples without knowing more about the radio chatter, but my guess is that you'd need a complex algorithm applied to the context of the keywords, unless you're willing to be scrambled a lot more times than your services are actually called for.
 
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