SA Firefighter

I went there again the other day and it was open again. The deal is that the place is up for sale and if not sold by the end of May will close for good, but until then is back open as normal.

latest news is the Crafers chicken shop will close at the end of May (pity).

well I went along this afternoon to observe.  It was quite an eye opener.  Saw Captcom start her evidence.  She handled it really well (I reckon).  I now understand her comment somewhere in this thread about "wasted time spent on educating the lawyers on how we work"!

I must say I can't see how anyone apart from the legal fraternity is going to benefit from this.  I highly recommend anyone who can to drop in for a while.

Don't look up 302 King William St in whereis.com.au because it tells you it's near Grenfell St which it's not.  It's the Coroners Court between Angas and Carrington Streets (southern corner of Vic Square).  It's pretty casual for visitors, no problems to drop in anytime and sit for a while.

It sounds like it's going to be sitting from 10am - 4:30pm except maybe with an early knock-off fridays (it's tough being a lawyer!).  It also sounded like there was the possibility it might move to another larger court at some stage.

2 on 2 of the trucks, only 1 on the others. Only Captain has one as well.

I'd be interested in how many VHF's trucks have as well..

in my group VHF:
currently it's 2 per "small" appliance (12/14) and 3 for the rest (24/34), soon to be 3 for all appliances.

those with 2 GRN portables in the truck should be for EMA (or else it's the captains one).

I'm lucky I'm in a job where I don't deal with customers and 99% of the time have vague sort of deadlines such that I can disappear early one day and so long as I make up the time at some point no one minds.  My employer (a large company) also has a policy that you can claim up to 10 days per year for emergency services (paid) leave which includes CFS, SES, army reserves etc.

You are supposed to get approval beforehand but for incidents I have left work for, such as the Mt Osmond fire, I went then rang my supervisor whilst on the way and said I've gone (I also told him to tell another guy at work who lives just near the golf course there that he might like to go home and protect his house!).

My point?  it's up to the employer in my opinion but there are good ones around.  Although it's tough if you work for a small business cos it's costing them money if you disappear.

1922914 17:06:56 23-04-06 Hacker Attack!!! 0-1-1 0:0:0 Hacker Attack! TCP: From: 82.117.208.66 To: 203.122.219.54

Sux to be them!

yes someone seems to like piping various emails out to their pager, including ebay watch messages.

If anyone gets to 3000 posts they should hold the rank of CEO 

I've noticed a few times now Euan Ferguson referred to as CEO not "chief officer", is there a difference? or has the CFS just decided to go all "corporate"?

PS. striker where's that quote in your sig come from?

well it's a slow afternoon but had an alerts call earlier and it got me thinking it would be handy to have alerts calls come up on my mobile with a different ringtone, preferably something fire-related (eg. like a siren or something).

previous attempts of mine to find and download a decent ringtone off the net have been a total waste of time, has anyone got any? or good places to look?

Some units are trialing voice activated recorders situated below the SAGRN speaker at base. Problem is that they activate when people have a conversation while standing nearby.

you'd have to pipe the audio into the recording device (patch a wire onto the speaker wire or audio out), not just put a tape recorder next to the speaker

I am considering something like this running on a PC:
http://www.nch.com.au/vrs/index.html

For myself, during a busy operational time I have needed to review the radio log to find out information (eg time of last contact to person & where they were).

How would you retrieve that kind of information from a recording device ?

But i think useful for 'day to day' small operations and general radio traffic. But would hate to review a recorded session to create a timeline or for oeprational analysis.

you'd have to play it back.  I don't think there's an automated way that's better than someone listening to the radio and moving tokens around on a whiteboard.

you can get a log of radio use from a program like ID Trunker connected to a scanner but you want beyond that.  You want software that does voice recognition and converts it to text... (not yet!)

jeez i'd be real happy if i was in one of those brigades. When people say things like that about volunteers, theres going to be a lot of people saying "well why do I waste my time if i'm going to be treated as sub standard?" Hopefully CFS and SAMFS can co exist down there. It would still make me feel worthless though.

depends how paranoid you are I guess.  If the callout rate is high enough that volunteers are putting in so much time, then the govt is taking advantage of volunteers (they still collect the ESL from everyone after all regardless of where you live) instead of paying them to provide a fire service as their job.  I don't see it as anything to do with CFS vs MFS (I think people are far too quick to jump on that bandwagon).

anyway this type of topic has been done to death before and I don't see anything productive coming out of it.

can't you just ask group/region to give you guys a hand with programming it? i think thats what our group did.

it was the group comms officer (at the time) who did all the scanners in your group, I doubt you'd get any help from R1!

to mengcfs: look on the SA-Scan yahoo group, lots of people have programmed them, they are much more of a pain than the UBC780 though.  Regarding recording it as a record of radio traffic, it's not a 100% solution, ie. not as good as connecting a radio to a recording device.  It's my tip that the lack of recorded radio traffic in many groups (and regions) is going to be one (of many) thing to come out of the Eyre Peninsula fire.

Yea so any way..


I also get annoyed with the poxy messages...


If your not at the call, ring the station if you want to sticky beak about it..

Unless it directly involves the job, and the crews not at the scene / station need to know.. THen find out at the next training night or sumthing..

A page telling crews that a truck is responding to the job, that the truck is at the scene, truck is leaving, and truck is back... Over kill...

If you're talking about the barossa ones, it's sent to group officers only.  If that's how that group wants to do it, that's their business (perhaps they have a group officer who can't get radio reception or something).

If you're talking about somewhere else where these type of pages are sent to everyone in the group, and you're in that group, then again it's obviously something the group management committee decided to do.  If you don't like it, put it on the agenda for the next group meeting.

Someone here said sending pages costs money, but does it? (ignoring the phone call or dialup to send the page).  Do you know the details of the CFS contract with Link?  It's not some "200 pages for $20" type deal you know.

If its relevant - then I dont mind so much..... but I do get rather annoyed when "xxx 24 returned to station" comes over the pagers. It also doesnt help relations with my employer to have the pager going off for no apparent reason. Its only set to chirp, but its still enough to distrct people..... Has said he doesnt mind having it on within reason.

simple: set it to vibrate only.

Quote from: medevac on March 25, 2006, 05:51:43 PM

hahah large norks...

re: hazmat... if it wasnt a HAZMAT... then why were two splash suits used??

Mate you don't have to convince me... I think hazmat should have gone from the outset...  (So yes, I think the RESPONSE from MFS should have been for a hazmat...)

But...  In a perfect world i spose...   

there's a form the local CFS EMA brigade can fill in and send in reporting that the response/dispatch procedures were not followed (if indeed they weren't).  EMA brigades in my group report it when it happens.