Your account¶

Signing in is one step: your PulseTech sign-in. Click Sign in, sign in to PulseTech if you are not already, and you land in the radio. PulseRadio has no password of its own to remember, and no form to fill in; the sign-in page has nothing on it but a spinner.

Your PulseRadio account is still a separate record from your PulseCAD one: a role in one is not a role in the other, and neither knows what the other lets you do. What changed in August 2026 is only how you prove who you are: it used to be a second email and password, and it is not any more.

Getting an account¶

Anybody can sign up, and there is no sign-up form to fill in — because signing in is signing up. Press Sign in, and the sign-on either recognises you or makes you an account on the spot.

Which of those happens depends on whether you already use PulseTech:

New to PulseTech: choose Continue with Discord at the sign-on. That is how a PulseTech account gets made; there is no email-and-password form to register on.
Already use PulseCAD, or any other PulseTech product: sign in as you normally do. Your PulseRadio record is created the first time you arrive, without you asking for it.

Either way you land in the radio with an account and no community yet. That is the next step.

Signed in as the wrong person¶

PulseRadio cannot fix that from its own page, because it is your PulseTech sign-in that says who you are. Use Sign out of PulseTech at the bottom of the sign-in page and start again.

Getting into a community¶

An account on its own does not put you on anybody's radio. You either create your own community, which makes you its owner, or you join one that already exists. You can own up to three.

Joining an existing one¶

Five ways, depending on how the community is set up:

linking your in-game radio, on a FiveM community: the code your radio gives you joins you to that community as a member, with no invite needed (see The in-game radio);
an invite link or join code from an owner or admin;
a join request, which an admin approves;
an owner adding you directly;
open join, if the community has switched it on: anybody with the community's ID is in the moment they ask, with nobody approving anything.

Communities that use open join usually put you in as a Scanner, which is a deliberately quiet start: you get a radio that hears the channels everybody hears, and you cannot transmit on it, cannot hear restricted channels and cannot open a console until an admin gives you a fuller role. That is the default, not a punishment: it means letting somebody in costs nothing, so the door can be left open.

You can belong to several communities and switch between them.

Working as¶

You can be in several departments at once (in the fire department and the sheriff's office all year) and what changes daily is which one you are out as. When your community gives departments their own radios, that is what decides which radio you carry. Communities that split radios by Discord role work the same way, with your roles in place of departments.

You change it on the radio itself, under Set → Working as. See The in-game radio. It is not on the website: it used to sit above the tabs on every page of a community, which put it in front of everybody on every screen and in front of nobody who was actually holding a radio at the time.

Two things about it:

It applies straight away. Your zones and channels are reprogrammed over the air as you change it, and the radio tells you so. There is nothing to rejoin for.
If you are signed on to a PulseCAD unit, PulseCAD wins. Signing on in the MDT as a fire unit programs your radio as fire whatever this says, because you have already told the system what you are doing today. What you pick here is what programs you when you are not signed on.
Owners and admins can work as any department, including ones they are not in, so an admin can go out as fire for an evening and back again. Each change is written to the community's audit log.

If you are in only one, it is stated rather than offered; there is nothing to switch between. If you are in none, or your community gives everyone the same radio, the row is not shown.

Which departments you are in comes from PulseCAD, or from your roles in the community's Discord server, never from a list kept in PulseRadio. If the row is missing, that is where to look.

Light and dark¶

PulseRadio opens in light, and it does not follow your operating system: dark is a choice you make rather than something you arrive in.

There are two switches, and they do the same thing:

one at the top right of the page, beside your name;
the last item at the foot of the side menu, under the sections. It names the theme it will give you: Dark theme or Light theme on the admin pages, Dark mode or Light mode on the dispatch console.

In the desktop app's radio screen there is no side menu, so it is its own Appearance card there instead.

It is remembered per browser and per machine, not on your account. Signing in somewhere else starts you in light again, and two people sharing a dispatch position can each have their own.

Everything about you, as opposed to about your community, is behind your initials and name at the top right of every page.


Your radio ID and name	Your display name, your callsign and your radio ID. See below.
Downloads	The desktop app, for Windows and Mac. It is your own page rather than a community's, so it opens whether or not you are in a community; in Admin it is also at the foot of the side menu. The FiveM resource is not here: it is under Connections → Game servers, because downloading it changes that server's key.
Switch community	Back to the picker, which is also where you create or join another one. There is a second one at the foot of the side menu, which is the one to reach for while you are working a board: the account menu lives in the site header, and the header is hidden when the console goes full screen.
Change password	Opens your PulseTech account settings in a new tab (see below).
Help and docs	These pages.
Send feedback	A bug, an idea or a question, straight to the PulseTech team.
Support PIN	Only if your community's plan includes phone support (see below).
Sign out

Your radio ID and name¶

Three fields, and they are not all the same scope.


Display name	Your Pulse account. It follows you into every community you belong to.
Callsign	This community only. Blank falls back to your display name.
Radio ID	This community only. The number a dispatcher sees when you key up.

Whether you can change the last two is up to your community. The radio ID is editable only if an admin has set Who can change their own radio ID to Anybody here, and only inside the range they chose. In a community linked to PulseCAD, the callsign is locked only while you are signed on to a PulseCAD unit, because that unit's callsign is what shows. Off a unit, you can set your own. In both cases the field is shown and says why, rather than being hidden.

If your community plays FiveM you can do the same from the game with /radio id.

The desktop app on a Mac¶

The Mac app needs macOS 12 or later, and runs on both Apple silicon and Intel Macs. Open the download and drag PulseRadio into Applications.

The first time you open it, macOS asks whether PulseRadio may use Input Monitoring. Allow it: that is what lets your push-to-talk key work while another app is in front. Until you do, the app cannot see your bound keys, and the Keys list says so, with a button that opens the right page of System Settings. You can turn it off again there at any time. Nothing you type is recorded or sent anywhere; the app only notices the keys you have bound.

Two things behave differently from Windows:

Keys go quiet while you type a password anywhere. macOS hides the keyboard from every app while a password box has focus, so a keyboard talk key does nothing for that moment and comes back on its own. A mouse button or a foot pedal keeps working.
The radio overlay shows over games running in a window, not over a game in macOS full screen, which gets a desktop of its own. Switch the game to windowed mode if you cannot see your radio.

The first time you key up, macOS also asks for the microphone.

Send feedback¶

The box asks for a message and whether it is a bug, an idea, a question or something else. It also sends, automatically, the page you were on, which PulseRadio build you are running, your browser and your window size — the things that make a report diagnosable and that nobody thinks to include. Nothing else is attached, and the dialog says so above the Send button.

Support PIN¶

An eight-digit code you read to phone support so they know it is really you. It changes every five minutes, and the menu shows how long the current one has left.

It is the same PIN across every Pulse product you use, so if you also use PulseCAD there is one number to remember, not two. It appears only for owners and administrators of a community whose plan includes phone support; everybody else reaches us through the feedback box above, or through Discord.

Changing or forgetting your password¶

There is no PulseRadio password, so there is nothing here to change or forget — your PulseTech sign-in is the only one involved.

Changing it while you are signed in: Change password in the account menu opens your PulseTech account settings in a new tab. Update it there and your next sign-in uses the new one.
Forgetting it: recover it at the PulseTech sign-in screen, not here.

Signing in¶

One browser and one desktop app at a time, counted separately. Signing in on another browser signs out the previous browser; signing in on another machine's desktop app signs out the previous desktop app. The two do not sign each other out — you can run the app and keep the website open beside it.

Two more things that deliberately do not evict anything:

the in-game radio, which is minted per player session;
the console embedded in PulseCAD, so working a dispatch board never signs you out of the radio tab open beside it.

The console inside PulseCAD¶

If your community has connected PulseRadio to PulseCAD, the radio appears on the dispatch board and signs you in by itself: you are already signed in to PulseCAD, in that community, and that is all it needs. Nothing to type.

It stays signed in for that browser afterwards, and it does not sign you out of a PulseRadio tab you have open beside it.

If your board is older than this and still shows a sign-in form, PulseRadio has a separate account record and that form wants its email and password, not your PulseCAD ones.

Your talk control works anywhere on the CAD board; you do not have to click into the radio panel first.

Handing your community to somebody else¶

If you own a community, you can hand it over: on Plan & ownership, under Owner actions, see Transfer this community to somebody else. There are two ways to say who gets it:

Someone on the roster — pick them from the list.
By email address — type their address. They do not have to be a member: the transfer adds them to the community as it hands over. The address does have to belong to a PulseRadio account already, so if they have never signed in, ask them to do that once first.

Either way, type the community's name to confirm and press Transfer ownership, and they become the owner.

You stay on as an admin, so you keep everything you had except the two actions on that panel, which means you can be given ownership back, but you cannot take it back. Only the current owner can transfer. An admin cannot do it, however senior they are.

Removing the radio from a community¶

Same panel, Delete this community. The button opens a confirmation box naming the community; type delete in it to go ahead. Only the owner can do it and it cannot be undone.

It deletes every channel, zone, radio layout, radio ID, patch, tone and game server, along with the comms log and every recording. Everyone loses access at once, including you.

Two things it does not do:

It does not touch anybody's account. Yours and everyone else's carry on, along with any other communities you are in.
If your community also runs PulseCAD, nothing in CAD is affected. Your calls, units, people and billing are untouched. The community carries on as a CAD community that no longer has a radio.

If you want to leave a community rather than close it, ask an owner or admin to remove you from People; you do not need this.