[TheList] Volunteer sirens

Tue Mar 1 09:01:22 AEDT 2022

To my knowledge there's been no wholesale push. Local brigades tend to know
their community and what is, or isn't tolerable - also, what is or isn't
necessary.

Firefighters get notified of events by pager, by a smartphone app (AMS) and
by txt message, as well as by siren. So local conditions will dictate
whether the siren is of additional value... what's pager coverage like,
what's mobile coverage like, how many people are actually in earshot of the
siren when it goes off, etc.

I'm of the view that they've been around a lot longer than most people who
complain about them, and if they're infrequent then they're a fact of life
and one shouldn't grump.
But solutions such as delaying the siren activation a few minutes - to give
the pager/phone stuff a chance to work - have been seen as a reasonable
compromise in some areas.
(The siren being an excellent fall-back position if your telecomms stuff is
completely flopped over... the transmission leg from comms to the station
siren is over their radio network).

But then again i've been in metro areas my whole life and not lived in
close proximity to a siren (though I used to hear the Wainuiomata siren
from my Lower Hutt place, over the hills, from time to time, it wasn't
particularly loud given the distance).

Mark.

On Mon, 28 Feb 2022 at 10:17, Radio Engineering <
radio.restorations at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just a question that came up in discussion a few days ago.
> It was suggested that volunteer fire sirens around NZ are now silenced at
> night due to local council noise bylaws.
> It has been ten years since I lived in a small rural town which had a
> volunteer station so I don't know if their siren still goes off at night or
> not.
> What's the situation? Is this correct?
>
> _______________________________________________
> TheList mailing list
> TheList at radiowiki.org.nz
> http://radiowiki.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/thelist_radiowiki.org.nz
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://radiowiki.org.nz/pipermail/thelist_radiowiki.org.nz/attachments/20220301/4346d681/attachment-0001.html>