Hi all, as I posted to the blindscanner group I have returned from a
four day vacation in Lee County, Florida, and although the weather was a
little cooler then what I would have preferred I have learned some
rather interesting information about the newer dispatch terminals that are
more common with Motorola trunked radio systems particularly those type
II systems used in public safety operations.
        While in Florida I had the opportunity to visit the Lee County
Emergency Operations Center, and this houses the dispatch center for the
county fire departments and EMS, and also houses the central controller for
the countie's Motorola type II trunked system which is used by public
safety and other city and county services in  Fort. Myers, and Lee County,
Florida.  This is an older type II system that went on line in about 1990,
and the dispatch terminals are basically computer terminals using
Windows-NT, and lots of function keys.  According to some people who I
spoke to it is more of a DOS type screen but the mouse is available as
well as keystrokes for all of the functions that one would ever want to
use.  This includes logging functions, and radio functions, and other
things that one would need. Also, the administrative terminal where you
can obtain system records and activate and deactivate radios is Unix
based, and I think that this is promising for anyone with a screen reader
wanting to get into dispatching.    However, the newer Windows-NT
replacements for the older Unix based SIMMS terminals are coming soon, but
I am hopeful that with the right programming we can overcome these
glitches, which they'll be some probably.  If anyone has any questions to
ask of me please E-mail me on this, and I'll talk to you all soon.