With today scarce volunteer resources, it is ever more important to respect their time and availability
and to alert only the resources currently available. While hybrid alerting and Swissphone’s resource
management solutions solve the first part of the equation, Express-Alarm helps by alarming required
resources individually, without increasing the alarm duration.
The patented Express-Alarm option from Swissphone allows detaching of the alarm text from the
information about the recipient, thus greatly speeding up the transmission of the alarm to large num-
bers of addresses.
Instead of each Receiver Identity Code (RIC) address (A1, A2, A3, …, An) being addressed in turn,
one at a time, with the entire alarm text
individual tone only calls (RICs of the recipients: A1, A2, A3, …, An) are broadcast at the beginning of
a transmission. Afterwards, a common alphanumeric address Aα followed by an alarm text is broad-
cast simultaneously to all required users.
Depending on its RIC, the terminal displays the message (or not). This procedure reduces the volume
of data to be sent, considerably shortening the alarm transmission time. For example, up to 32 alarm
addresses can be sent in one second (POCSAG at 1200 bit / s). This is a useful short-cut for flexible
and fast alerting of resources.
Evaluate the alerting times of both procedures (calculation based on POCSAG 1200 bit /s):
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0 2 4
6 8 1012 14 1618 RIC
Sec.
80
60
50
40
30
20
10
0 2
4 6 810 12 14 1618 RIC
1 Master und 3 Ringe
An alarm with up to 15 addresses and approx.
80 characters of text in a network consisting of
a master and three rings takes only eight sec-
onds. With the previous standard alarm, such
an alarm ends only after 60 seconds.
Alarm messages with a length of 250 charac-
ters, which are quite common in emergency
services, take only 16 seconds even with 15
alarm addresses.
Every digital alarm network is compatible with Express-Alarm. This means that existing networks can
be retrofitted with this considerably faster alarm procedure.