What does everyone think about Rescue 21 and best practices, quirks in the system you've found, things you'd like to change, etc. Lets get this thing going because I know there's a lot of gripers and complaints out there...

Got to love the fact that LOBs are completly wrong on one of our hi-sites up here.

Personally I really like the R21 systems above what we use to have.

First, I'll start off with what I dislike about the system:
When using the broadcast manager, it does not automatically shift your channels back to the setting you had. I've had a few assets call out to me on 16 because I forgot to shift off of 22A.

I wish that in caller details you could put in more info so that SITREPS can basically be pulled from there. I beleive it lets you do 50 characters or something like that. Would be nice to have an area to contain information pertaining to that one case (in case you have multiple cases going)

the LOB lines that show when no audio is attatched. I don't quite get that... I don't care if it's picking up something it "thinks" it's hearing. I want LOB's off of things it definately hears.

Noooooow onto the things I LIKE about R21.

I love the ease of use of the Operator Audio Panel. you can basically sit a person who's never done a comms watch before on a R21 system and train them how to multi-select, single select, create patches, create multi-circuits in a matter of 30 minutes.

I really like the Broadcast Manager. When things get really busy and a UMIB or MARB has to go out, or I have 6 guards going on and 5 SMIBS to broadcast, that little puppy makes life SO much easier. (Spoils you too)

I've heard some complaints about LOB's going off in directions where they aren't suppose to be going, but here at Sector HR I haven't run into that issue yet. I really enjoy the ease of associating the LOB's to find an area that you can search in. And that fancy little Zoom makes things mighty nice when you have DF's.

I greatly appreciate the speed of being able to play back things instead of having to go over to a dictaphone or dvl to pull up something that you "might" have heard. Cutting down as much time as possible between answering calls is key when it comes to SAR.

I'll leave it at that for right now, maybe people can build a little off of what I gave and see where we go from there.

Ok. I brough it up to the PRO when I was in Scottsdale to have GD change the software on the whole thing you mentioned about when you use the broadcast manager and it not shifting your VHF's back to the original settings. I know they're working on that now.

As for the LOB's shooting off everywhere, are you talking about the "wagonwheel"...what they call it at GD. That may be due to your decay values set wrong in the system.


By the way, I actually got a SOS auto alarm on R21 from some boat last weekend in Morse Code.


Another thing theyre (GD) going to do shortly is change R21 to using a CAC card login just like SWS3. Basically they wil write it in so you can initially login using the CAC card, then pull the card out to login to your SWS3 workstation.