Fire Alarm & Communications Division

    The Fire Alarm and Communications Division is managed at the direction of the Chief .  The division is charged with the responsibility of maintaining six municipal wired alarm circuits throughout the North Scituate and Chopmist Hill districts, the retransmission system for the municipal wired system and all radio networks within the district.

    The wired Gamewell 100ma network consists of nineteen building master boxes, ten street boxes and a SigCom Vision 21 decoding network for translating the Gamewell boxes into a SigCom recognizable code.  The actual aerial wiring includes  six miles of "Figure 8" 6 pair cable", eight miles of "Figure 8" 3 pair cable" as well as eight miles of "Rural C" wiring.  All cables terminate in the North Scituate Fire station with redundant registers at the Chopmist Hill Fire station.  A sophisticated network of decoding and retransmission electronics in turn repeats the Gamewell system to the dispatch center located eight miles south within the Village of Hope.

    For the love of our heritage and the respect to our old-timers, we have attempted to maintain a Gamewell Diaphone Air Horn for alerting our old, quaint village that the "volunteers" are coming.  However, all good things must come to an end and the "Horn" has been retired.

    Our radio system operates from a main radio transmitter located on Chopmist Hill at the elevation of 682 feet.  Our principal operating frequency is 154.040 mHz with a call sign of WPCE-497.    Our local back-up base station is towered at the North Scituate Fire Department with a call sign of KNHF-500.  We have also maintained our alliance with Northern Rhode Island fire departments and utilize 154.190 mHz with a call sign of KCA-474 for mutual aid to our brothers and the Rhode Island "Northern Control" Intercity Radio Network.

    All departmental radios are Motorola and have a channel capacity of sixteen channels, which allow for efficient interagency co-operation during the calls for mutual assistance.  Within the next few months the North Scituate Fire Dept. and the Town of Scituate will be converting to a repeater operation.  Scituate's new call sign will be WQCD702.  Our output channel will change to a "narrow band" frequency of 158.9475 with a digital "PL".  The System will consist of transmitter "steered" sites, one in the south end of town and one still operating at the Chopmist Hill Fire station.  We will be adding "ID and Emergency" to all radios which will display at a new Zetron CRT console in the Scituate Fire Alarm office at the Police Dept. and in the North Scituate Fire Alarm Office.

Alarm 29 "Keepin' da bells ringin'"

Send mail to webmaster@northscituatefd.org with questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright © 2002 North Scituate Fire Department No.1