I posted this online earlier in the week. I've been noticing that within the last several months, I could hear a siren somewhere off in the distance from our home that has the distinctive "hard" wind-up of a typical Whelen siren compared to the soft ramp-up feature that our system is uniqu...

There's actually a high likelihood that the siren you are hearing that randomly cuts from voice to tone is a Whelen. They have a number of them on the base with the WAVES sirens. They are on WAVES RTUs. The WAVES sirens will actually wind up when activated.

Peach County recently had a batch of 508s installed in their system to extend their network's coverage and replace a Whelen Vortex-R4 that picked a fight with Thor and woke up dead afterward. Their system consists of a mix of R4s, these new 508s, a 2nd gen 2001-SRN, and a STH-10A. The Blue Bird plan...

A Vortex R4 from 9.3 miles away, 14V-B from 8 miles away, and 16V1T-B from roughly 7.5 miles away. Unfortunately, my cameras didn't pick up the Sentry sirens as well in those cases where I've heard them in the distance, but one did manage to pick up the Vortex.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSG1dQrEFZg

On the electronic siren side of things, Klaxon is actually a reseller of sirens from the company Comtel in Greece. This is one of the products that they produce called the Sound Box Electronic siren, which comes as either a single-emitter siren or a two-emitter unit, which I'll attach below. They ar...

ATI sirens, at least from the limited documentation I've seen, are little more than Raspberry Pis (or something equivalent) mated to an amplifier board. Its little wonder so many of them just play things back. ATI's controllers are actually capable of producing a number of custom tones natively, bu...

Alertus has been doing a lot of sales on the education side of things, so it would be interesting to see if they were to win this and a countywide system of HPSAs go up. HQE/SiRcom has been doing more on the military side especially since WAVES went defunct a couple of years ago. They've been pickin...

It's either a HPSA-3104 or a HPSA-81x4-R (x = 0, 1, or 2, depending on the age and radio). There isn't a way to tell unless you know what controller was on the siren originally. Since WAVES switched from SiRcom's horns to their own in around 2010-ish, this is a newer unit from Eaton or Cooper Notifi...

Originally the sirens had dual-toned ESC-864 logic boards and typical Type II cabinets of that era. They upgraded them in the early 2000s to the 2020s and decided to do a complete upgrade to the controls, where they ditched the cabinets for the ones they had up until the point when they were replace...

For anyone wondering why these are using the tones they do instead of the typical dual-tone European ones (415/425 Hz), the system in Flagstaff is actually using a newer controller that is made by Alertus. The company previously imported its controllers from Telegrafia or whoever makes their equipme...