When I started dispatching in the 1970’s we had UHF and VHF channels that we used. While our police dispatch was on a UHF repeater, we had simplex VHF fire channels as well as our police backup channel. That backup channel was our old VHF channel that was retained when many Chicago area suburbs transitioned to the UHF T-Band (470-476 MHz.) back in the mid 1970’s.
Ou UHF dispatch channel was called Channel 1, even though it was in the F4 position on the MX340 portable radios we had then. This was due to the shared infrastructure procurement with a batch of other communities mostly to our south. Channels 1, 2 and 3 were used by other towns but all of the radios were programmed identically so that we had access to their channels and vice-versa.
What we called Channel 2 was our old VHF high-band channel. This channel was not in our portables of course, since those were UHF, but it was in the F2 position in our mobile radios. These radios were provided by the State of Illinois under the ISPERN program. They would provide VHF mobile radios, such as Motracs, Micors, and the GE equivalents to any police department that wanted them, all paid for by a federal grant. The basic rules were that the ISPERN channel (154.680, later switched to 155.475) was installed in the Channel 1 position and that the Priority function was hardwired in the ON position forcing users to monitor the ISPERN channel.
Agencies were allowed to populate the F2, F3 and F4 positions with their own channels if they chose, at their own expense. This basically meant adding the proper channel elements, even then it was not all that expensive to do. Most agencies put in either the old VHF channel they were using before T-Band or their Public Works channels. Often, they would do both, using the PW channel at night after the street and water departments went home. The VHF police channels were still busy, and what they called “skip” was common. The PW channels were often less crowded.
The town I dispatched in shared the VHF channel with several others in northern Illinois, northwest Indiana and southwest Michigan. We could hear some of the closer agencies during the day but at night, especially in the summer, the further ones would boom in. Most of these had repeaters so we could hear both sides. As we did not yet use PL on this channel, we had little choice but to listen in lest we miss a call from one of our guys. This was the channel where the guys on the street would occasionally ask the dispatcher if they wanted coffee, food from McDonalds or a bathroom break so we always made sure to monitor it.
The fire channel was also a simplex VHF high-band frequency with no PL. On this we could hear several places in Indiana and Illinois but for the most part they too were simplex.
After a while we got pretty familiar with the voices from the other agencies. On the evening shift there was a police department some 25 or 30 miles away we listened to that had a dispatcher who had a voice that drove me wild. I had no idea what she looked like, but I just HAD to meet her. I thought of an excuse to call and started chatting. We agreed to meet for a bit at the local Denny’s near her town after shift. Nothing much happened with that, however. She didn’t seem impressed with me, and I certainly wasn’t impressed by her. The voice did not match reality.
Another dispatcher I knew on our fire channel wanted to meet a dispatcher from a larger town in Indiana that we listened to regularly. He had a distinctive voice and dispatching style: “Call for da amb-a-lantz, call for da amb-a-lantz, Amb-a-lantz number 1…” We called down there and he invited us to a tour of his dispatch center. We went the next night and met him and made a long-time friend.
Another friend and I arranged a tour at the dispatch center for a sheriff’s agency in Indiana that he would always listen to. For some reason this county’s repeater fascinated him and he always had it in his scanner. We went down there and enjoyed meeting the people who’s voices we knew so well.
On Midnight shift there was a dispatcher on the fire mutual aid channel that would come up on the hour with their callsign without fail. She too had a voice that, well, intrigued me. I looked up the callsign in my Police Call directory and found that it came back to a fire district west of me 15 miles or so. I called her and we met for breakfast that morning after work.
Now, I had never met this girl before, so I don’t know if this was her regular style or not. When I arrived at her fire station to pick her up at 8:00 AM she was wearing a fancy dress that would fit right in at a swanky charity ball or something. I was dressed in jeans, boots and a western shirt, my usual attire of the 1970’s. I was a country boy, and I had skipped the whole disco fiasco. I tried to think of a polite way to ask if she always wore dresses like this, kept one in her locker just in case she was going to meet the man of her dreams or what, but I never thought of a way to ask. Again, this didn’t go anywhere but apparently I was not the only guy to call her due to the voice, I found out a few years later that it was pretty much a regular occurrence and she did this on purpose to meet guys.
One summer a friend and I went up to a state park in Wisconsin to go camping. We met a couple girls in the next campsite and shared some beverages and discussion. I gravitated to the blond and Dan to the brunette. Turns out they were sisters. I could have sworn I knew the blond but just could not place her. They were also from Illinois, living a couple towns down from where I worked. All of a sudden, I realized who she was, she was a State Police dispatcher; we had spoken on the “Point to Point” radio channel several times over the last year. When I mentioned that was how I knew her, she asked what town I worked in and when I told her she exclaimed “You’re the guy who calls us for crashes on Route xx all the time!” That was me. We hit it off and had a great time for the next couple days, hiking, swimming and drinking among other activities. What she failed to mention was that she was married, I found that out when I called her a few days after returning home.
A couple of us radio geeks/dispatchers had fascination with the State Police radio operations. We loved to listen to the 42 MHz. channels they used and admired the professional operation on their radio channels. They were a real class act at the time. We made a point of visiting the several State Police posts around the area when we could. At a different post than my adulterous friend worked we met up with another pair of (single) female dispatchers and visited them at their post. We enjoyed seeing the radio room there and got a kick out of the red rotating light on the radio cabinet that lit up when they were transmitting on the ISPERN channel. My buddy Dan snagged a similar light out of the fire department storeroom and connected it up to the console at his (Fire only) dispatch center to indicate they were transmitting.
Outside meeting female dispatchers, we usually enjoyed listening to other areas on our channels. Our towns were not that busy and we had a lot of down time, so it helped keep us awake and alert. During the winter I could go the entire midnight shift with no activity on the log as often as not, so it was a great diversion. When we had temperature inversions in the summer we might hear agencies hundreds of miles away in northern Wisconsin, Michigan, or even into Iowa or Ohio.
Later, in the mid 80’s when I was hired on as a police officer in a different town, I had less opportunity to listen to the radios in the radio room until I started taking care of the radios. We did hear many different agencies here however. Our tower was quite a bit taller than the old town and we were right on the shore of Lake Michigan. Again, our police dispatch was on a UHF repeater, so we normally only heard our local towns, but we also had a VHF simplex channel for police backup (called Channel 10) and another for fire. Both were carrier squelch, so we heard all kinds of stuff in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois. The furthest away I ever heard traffic from was from suburban Pittsburgh, PA. This was over 400 miles away and I heard them a few times during big inversion events.
After I took over maintenance of the radio system, I added PL tones to both of these VHF channels. While this ended the fun of listening to stuff from all over it made for a quieter time and less missed calls from the guys we were actually needing to communicate with. Occasionally we would hear an agency in northern Michigan on the same PL on our fire channel or far northern Wisconsin on the police channel. We also had occasional issues with outside agencies with very similar Two-Tone codes opening up the alert receivers in our fire house when conditions were up. The alert receiver did not have PL and thus would open as long as the proper (or close enough) tones were heard regardless of PL. I had to change the tones to alleviate that.
Eventually I was able to obtain a new fire channel for our area as, even with PL, we were getting blasted by Indiana and Michigan stations. One county dispatch center in Indiana would set up EVERY tone they had on Sundays at noon. It would take about 20 to 25 minutes for them to go thru all the tones, each set followed by a test message and call sign. It just went on and on and on and on… They were so strong into us since they too were right on Lake Michigan. This made the channel unusable for the entire time. When a storm was predicted they would do the same thing and advise of the “Severe weather statement”. Of course, we were usually affected by the same storms and would be busy, having the channel tied up like that was a safety issue. We contacted them but they had no desire to alter their operations. The 4 fire departments that switched to the new channel around us were happy to invest in it, finally we had a nice and quiet channel to operate on.
On our UHF channels were usually never heard other traffic since they were protected by PL and due to the shorter range of UHF versus VHF. In the new town one night we had a satellite receiver go bad; the PL board had failed. This caused an agency in the far south suburbs to come across our channel occasionally until we got that repaired. We also had occasional oddball MDC numbers pop up on our MDC decoders. We eventually traced them to a different town in DuPage County to our west. Apparently, the MDC decoder was connected to a point on the receiver that did not restrict to our PL code.
In my old town there was a community college just a few miles away that was also using the same UHF T-Band channel as us, they had received that allocation after another town decided to retain their old VHF channel instead of moving to UHF. They were too far away to use our repeater, so they set up their own. If one was on the far south side of our town, we could hear them when we disabled the PL on our portable radios. We could also get some heterodyne interference in that area if both our and their repeaters were talking at the same time. It was mostly an annoyance at worst.
Even after both communities I worked at added PL protection I would often turn that off if I wasn’t busy. As a scanner guy I always liked to hear stuff and both towns were pretty quiet to it provided entertainment.
Occasionally a couple of us would bring our R7000’s and a PL decoder to work and connect it to the VHF antenna at the top of our 110-foot tower after work. During one particularly great temperature inversion we were listening to VHF traffic as far away as Minnesota, Iowa and Ohio in addition to the more common Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois traffic. I could not prove it but I am pretty sure I heard traffic from southwestern Ontario a few times. I did hear some “VE” prefixed call signs on some 2M repeaters from time to time as well.
Our mobile radios would also pick up distant stations but obviously nowhere near as much or as often as the base radios. Before we had PL it could be difficult at best to pick our dispatcher out of the noise on a warm summer night. Being right on the lake exacerbated the issue. The old Micor radios we had when I first started were famously sensitive. Later the GE Mastr-II’s were much less so. We eventually had CDM1250’s in the cars when I retired, these were not quite as sensitive as the Micors and Motrans of decades past, but they performed a lot better than the GM300’s, Spectras and Syntors that preceded them.
Listening and them meeting the people you listen to regularly has always been a two-edged sword. While I made several dates this way only once did it result in something, and she turned out to be married. The saying goes you should never meet your heroes. Well maybe in this hobby you should never meet the girl with the sexy voice.
Ou UHF dispatch channel was called Channel 1, even though it was in the F4 position on the MX340 portable radios we had then. This was due to the shared infrastructure procurement with a batch of other communities mostly to our south. Channels 1, 2 and 3 were used by other towns but all of the radios were programmed identically so that we had access to their channels and vice-versa.
What we called Channel 2 was our old VHF high-band channel. This channel was not in our portables of course, since those were UHF, but it was in the F2 position in our mobile radios. These radios were provided by the State of Illinois under the ISPERN program. They would provide VHF mobile radios, such as Motracs, Micors, and the GE equivalents to any police department that wanted them, all paid for by a federal grant. The basic rules were that the ISPERN channel (154.680, later switched to 155.475) was installed in the Channel 1 position and that the Priority function was hardwired in the ON position forcing users to monitor the ISPERN channel.
Agencies were allowed to populate the F2, F3 and F4 positions with their own channels if they chose, at their own expense. This basically meant adding the proper channel elements, even then it was not all that expensive to do. Most agencies put in either the old VHF channel they were using before T-Band or their Public Works channels. Often, they would do both, using the PW channel at night after the street and water departments went home. The VHF police channels were still busy, and what they called “skip” was common. The PW channels were often less crowded.
The town I dispatched in shared the VHF channel with several others in northern Illinois, northwest Indiana and southwest Michigan. We could hear some of the closer agencies during the day but at night, especially in the summer, the further ones would boom in. Most of these had repeaters so we could hear both sides. As we did not yet use PL on this channel, we had little choice but to listen in lest we miss a call from one of our guys. This was the channel where the guys on the street would occasionally ask the dispatcher if they wanted coffee, food from McDonalds or a bathroom break so we always made sure to monitor it.
The fire channel was also a simplex VHF high-band frequency with no PL. On this we could hear several places in Indiana and Illinois but for the most part they too were simplex.
After a while we got pretty familiar with the voices from the other agencies. On the evening shift there was a police department some 25 or 30 miles away we listened to that had a dispatcher who had a voice that drove me wild. I had no idea what she looked like, but I just HAD to meet her. I thought of an excuse to call and started chatting. We agreed to meet for a bit at the local Denny’s near her town after shift. Nothing much happened with that, however. She didn’t seem impressed with me, and I certainly wasn’t impressed by her. The voice did not match reality.
Another dispatcher I knew on our fire channel wanted to meet a dispatcher from a larger town in Indiana that we listened to regularly. He had a distinctive voice and dispatching style: “Call for da amb-a-lantz, call for da amb-a-lantz, Amb-a-lantz number 1…” We called down there and he invited us to a tour of his dispatch center. We went the next night and met him and made a long-time friend.
Another friend and I arranged a tour at the dispatch center for a sheriff’s agency in Indiana that he would always listen to. For some reason this county’s repeater fascinated him and he always had it in his scanner. We went down there and enjoyed meeting the people who’s voices we knew so well.
On Midnight shift there was a dispatcher on the fire mutual aid channel that would come up on the hour with their callsign without fail. She too had a voice that, well, intrigued me. I looked up the callsign in my Police Call directory and found that it came back to a fire district west of me 15 miles or so. I called her and we met for breakfast that morning after work.
Now, I had never met this girl before, so I don’t know if this was her regular style or not. When I arrived at her fire station to pick her up at 8:00 AM she was wearing a fancy dress that would fit right in at a swanky charity ball or something. I was dressed in jeans, boots and a western shirt, my usual attire of the 1970’s. I was a country boy, and I had skipped the whole disco fiasco. I tried to think of a polite way to ask if she always wore dresses like this, kept one in her locker just in case she was going to meet the man of her dreams or what, but I never thought of a way to ask. Again, this didn’t go anywhere but apparently I was not the only guy to call her due to the voice, I found out a few years later that it was pretty much a regular occurrence and she did this on purpose to meet guys.
One summer a friend and I went up to a state park in Wisconsin to go camping. We met a couple girls in the next campsite and shared some beverages and discussion. I gravitated to the blond and Dan to the brunette. Turns out they were sisters. I could have sworn I knew the blond but just could not place her. They were also from Illinois, living a couple towns down from where I worked. All of a sudden, I realized who she was, she was a State Police dispatcher; we had spoken on the “Point to Point” radio channel several times over the last year. When I mentioned that was how I knew her, she asked what town I worked in and when I told her she exclaimed “You’re the guy who calls us for crashes on Route xx all the time!” That was me. We hit it off and had a great time for the next couple days, hiking, swimming and drinking among other activities. What she failed to mention was that she was married, I found that out when I called her a few days after returning home.
A couple of us radio geeks/dispatchers had fascination with the State Police radio operations. We loved to listen to the 42 MHz. channels they used and admired the professional operation on their radio channels. They were a real class act at the time. We made a point of visiting the several State Police posts around the area when we could. At a different post than my adulterous friend worked we met up with another pair of (single) female dispatchers and visited them at their post. We enjoyed seeing the radio room there and got a kick out of the red rotating light on the radio cabinet that lit up when they were transmitting on the ISPERN channel. My buddy Dan snagged a similar light out of the fire department storeroom and connected it up to the console at his (Fire only) dispatch center to indicate they were transmitting.
Outside meeting female dispatchers, we usually enjoyed listening to other areas on our channels. Our towns were not that busy and we had a lot of down time, so it helped keep us awake and alert. During the winter I could go the entire midnight shift with no activity on the log as often as not, so it was a great diversion. When we had temperature inversions in the summer we might hear agencies hundreds of miles away in northern Wisconsin, Michigan, or even into Iowa or Ohio.
Later, in the mid 80’s when I was hired on as a police officer in a different town, I had less opportunity to listen to the radios in the radio room until I started taking care of the radios. We did hear many different agencies here however. Our tower was quite a bit taller than the old town and we were right on the shore of Lake Michigan. Again, our police dispatch was on a UHF repeater, so we normally only heard our local towns, but we also had a VHF simplex channel for police backup (called Channel 10) and another for fire. Both were carrier squelch, so we heard all kinds of stuff in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois. The furthest away I ever heard traffic from was from suburban Pittsburgh, PA. This was over 400 miles away and I heard them a few times during big inversion events.
After I took over maintenance of the radio system, I added PL tones to both of these VHF channels. While this ended the fun of listening to stuff from all over it made for a quieter time and less missed calls from the guys we were actually needing to communicate with. Occasionally we would hear an agency in northern Michigan on the same PL on our fire channel or far northern Wisconsin on the police channel. We also had occasional issues with outside agencies with very similar Two-Tone codes opening up the alert receivers in our fire house when conditions were up. The alert receiver did not have PL and thus would open as long as the proper (or close enough) tones were heard regardless of PL. I had to change the tones to alleviate that.
Eventually I was able to obtain a new fire channel for our area as, even with PL, we were getting blasted by Indiana and Michigan stations. One county dispatch center in Indiana would set up EVERY tone they had on Sundays at noon. It would take about 20 to 25 minutes for them to go thru all the tones, each set followed by a test message and call sign. It just went on and on and on and on… They were so strong into us since they too were right on Lake Michigan. This made the channel unusable for the entire time. When a storm was predicted they would do the same thing and advise of the “Severe weather statement”. Of course, we were usually affected by the same storms and would be busy, having the channel tied up like that was a safety issue. We contacted them but they had no desire to alter their operations. The 4 fire departments that switched to the new channel around us were happy to invest in it, finally we had a nice and quiet channel to operate on.
On our UHF channels were usually never heard other traffic since they were protected by PL and due to the shorter range of UHF versus VHF. In the new town one night we had a satellite receiver go bad; the PL board had failed. This caused an agency in the far south suburbs to come across our channel occasionally until we got that repaired. We also had occasional oddball MDC numbers pop up on our MDC decoders. We eventually traced them to a different town in DuPage County to our west. Apparently, the MDC decoder was connected to a point on the receiver that did not restrict to our PL code.
In my old town there was a community college just a few miles away that was also using the same UHF T-Band channel as us, they had received that allocation after another town decided to retain their old VHF channel instead of moving to UHF. They were too far away to use our repeater, so they set up their own. If one was on the far south side of our town, we could hear them when we disabled the PL on our portable radios. We could also get some heterodyne interference in that area if both our and their repeaters were talking at the same time. It was mostly an annoyance at worst.
Even after both communities I worked at added PL protection I would often turn that off if I wasn’t busy. As a scanner guy I always liked to hear stuff and both towns were pretty quiet to it provided entertainment.
Occasionally a couple of us would bring our R7000’s and a PL decoder to work and connect it to the VHF antenna at the top of our 110-foot tower after work. During one particularly great temperature inversion we were listening to VHF traffic as far away as Minnesota, Iowa and Ohio in addition to the more common Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois traffic. I could not prove it but I am pretty sure I heard traffic from southwestern Ontario a few times. I did hear some “VE” prefixed call signs on some 2M repeaters from time to time as well.
Our mobile radios would also pick up distant stations but obviously nowhere near as much or as often as the base radios. Before we had PL it could be difficult at best to pick our dispatcher out of the noise on a warm summer night. Being right on the lake exacerbated the issue. The old Micor radios we had when I first started were famously sensitive. Later the GE Mastr-II’s were much less so. We eventually had CDM1250’s in the cars when I retired, these were not quite as sensitive as the Micors and Motrans of decades past, but they performed a lot better than the GM300’s, Spectras and Syntors that preceded them.
Listening and them meeting the people you listen to regularly has always been a two-edged sword. While I made several dates this way only once did it result in something, and she turned out to be married. The saying goes you should never meet your heroes. Well maybe in this hobby you should never meet the girl with the sexy voice.
