The dispatch console¶
The console is the board a dispatcher works. It fills the window, and while you are connected it takes over the whole page.
Three consoles, one radio¶
The board comes in three looks, and you switch between them with the Net Control / Base Station / Handset control in the console's own chrome:
| Handset | The default. Large targets, a paged board and an on-screen talk bar. Built for a touchscreen at the desk, and the one that needs no keyboard. |
| Net Control | Dark and dense, every zone visible at once, laid out for a mouse and a keyboard. |
| Base Station | The bevelled console with folder tabs, a patch/Msel slot rail and the activity log docked along the bottom. Light chrome by default. |
They are the same radio. Every card, button and pane does the same thing on all three, and switching does not drop you off the net: the audio session is not rebuilt, so you can change your mind mid-shift without losing a word.
Day and night¶
Each console carries a sun / moon pair in its chrome. It is the room, not the product: Net Control and Handset open dark and go a lighter steel by day, and Base Station opens in light chrome and goes dark by night. The choice is remembered per console and per machine, like the console itself, so the board you work at three in the morning stays the way you left it.
The choice is yours and is remembered on that machine, from the first time you pick one. It is not a community setting; which console you find readable is a fact about you, not about the agency.
Connecting¶
There is no power button: being on the console page is being at the position. Press Connect and the board comes live.
Your browser asks for the microphone. The radio needs it even if you only intend to listen, because it publishes a single permanently-muted track and unmutes it when you key up. Creating the track on each press instead would add a renegotiation to the start of every transmission.
The board comes up cold: nothing monitored, nothing primed. That is deliberate. A console that armed every channel you may transmit on would hand a new operator a microphone pointed at the whole county before they had looked at the board. Whatever you had last time is restored, so the cold start happens once.
PulseTech staff and your channels
PulseTech support staff hold platform administrator rights and can work your board carrying every channel, including restricted ones, and can transmit on them. There is no separate mode to switch on and nothing to tick: it is simply what being staff means, and it is the same access they hold in PulseCAD.
Where a staff member changes something in your community, an entry naming them is written to your audit log. Looking is not recorded. Contact us if you need an account of access to your community's data.
Radio check¶
Every sign-on offers a radio check. It is a procedure, not an onboarding tour: what it catches (wrong microphone, headset unplugged since the last shift, gain knocked) is exactly what changes between shifts.
Hold your talk control (or the on-screen button), say your callsign, and it plays you back through the receive chain so you hear what the net hears. Nothing goes out. The recording is taken before the transmit path, and while the check is open the whole console is prevented from transmitting.
If you have never chosen a talk control, the check asks you to set one first.
Resource cards¶
Each channel is a card, grouped into the zones your admin defined. A card shows:
- the callsign in large mono type, the first thing you read;
- the channel type badge (
TRK,CONV,DIR,RX) and the talkgroup ID if it has one; - who is talking and for how long (
1A-35 · 0:47), or the last unit heard and how long ago (last: JREISNER · 4m ago). The elapsed time turns amber once somebody has held the channel for more than half a minute, and an old last-heard line fades as it ages so recent traffic pulls the eye; - an amber count if transmissions went out on this channel that you could not hear, because you were not monitoring it, or had it muted, or had the master volume down. It clears when you look: start monitoring the channel, open the card, or click the count itself. A channel you were listening to never grows one, however long you were heads-down on something else;
- a microphone down the left edge; hold it to talk on that channel once, without priming it;
- RX, SCN and TX buttons, and a chevron that expands the card.
Color means one thing: red is air. A card goes red when audio is moving, yours or somebody else's. Priming does not make a card red, because a board with six primed channels would be a wall of red carrying no information.
RX, SCN and TX¶
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| RX | Monitor at priority. You hear it, and it never gives way. |
| SCN | Monitor at scan priority. Audible, but silenced while any priority channel is talking. |
| TX | Prime for transmit. Your talk control goes out on everything primed. |
Priming implies monitoring: you cannot talk on something you are not listening to.
Clicking a card¶
One gesture means one thing, and it means the same thing on all three consoles.
| Gesture | What it does |
|---|---|
| Click | Prime for transmit. A toggle, so a second click puts it out. |
| Shift + click | Scan. |
| Ctrl + click | Monitor at priority. |
| Right click | Open the card. Alt + click does the same. |
| Middle click | Mute this channel. |
| Alt + wheel | This channel's volume. |
Building a six-channel fan-out is six clicks. RX, SCN and TX keep working exactly as before, so nothing is reachable only by modifier; they are the same acts, for a hand already on the card.
The wheel on its own still scrolls the board, which is why volume needs Alt: your cursor is over a card almost all of the time, and a bare wheel would roll the volume of every card you scrolled past.
Right click never opens the browser's own menu anywhere on the board.
This replaces Select mode
Older builds had a Select toggle in the action bar that made a click prime instead of expand. It is gone: a click primes everywhere now, so there is nothing left for it to switch. Right click opens a card.
Inside a card¶
Expand a card for per-channel volume and mute, its prime key, its talk key, which speaker it plays out of, monitor, and its recall slots.
Talking¶
Your talk control is bound in Position settings: a key, a mouse side button, a controller button, a pedal, a PTT mic. Left and right mouse cannot be used: holding either takes the button away from the board you are pressing it on.
Holding it transmits on every primed channel at once. That is multi-select: the members do not hear each other, only you reach all of them.
Three other ways to talk:
- A card's microphone: hold it to talk on that channel alone, without disturbing what is primed.
- A per-channel talk key: the same thing, bound to a key. A busy position answers the channel that just called without moving its selector.
- Latch mode: one press opens the channel, another drops it.
When you are refused¶
If somebody with equal or higher talk power is already transmitting, you are denied and hear a blocked tone. That is the point: dispatch and field units are the same level by default, so neither can walk over the other and channel discipline is a human matter, as in life.
To get in over a conversation already running, hold PRI PTT; see below.
There is no panic button on the console, deliberately. A panic declares that the person pressing it is in trouble, and a dispatcher at a desk is not who that is about; it comes from a field radio's orange button. What the console does have is the other half: when a unit raises one, you can acknowledge it and you can clear it. See Emergency alarms below.
An admin can also grant panic talk power to a unit who needs to be heard over everyone, and take it back.
The board's action bar carried a button labeled Priority until recently. It declared an emergency, which is not what the word means here. It is gone, and the button that marks a channel as busy working an incident is Pri Traf.
Priority PTT¶
PRI PTT is the hold-to-talk version, and most of the time it is the one you want. Hold it and the channels you already have primed go out at priority talk power, so you get in over a conversation already running instead of being refused. Let go and you are an ordinary unit again.
It is not an emergency. Nothing is declared, no alarm card appears on anyone's board, and the transmission is logged the way every transmission is logged. That is the difference from Panic beside it, which is a state you take and give back and which does raise an alarm across the center.
A unit in trouble still comes over the top of you. Priority PTT sits below a panic, deliberately: the one thing it must never do is lock out the transmission the whole system exists to protect. Two operators both holding it do not walk over each other either.
By default it is Shift + your own talk control, so if you talk on </kbd>, priority
talk is <kbd>Shift</kbd>+<kbd>. It lands under a finger already on the key, it cannot be hit while
reaching for something else, and it follows you if you rebind your talk control. Change it under
Position settings → Priority talk control, and once you have set your own we stop moving it.
If you talk on a pedal, a controller or a PTT mic, there is no shifted version of that, so those get no priority key by default; bind one yourself, or use the button on the board, which works either way.
It is always hold-to-talk, even when your ordinary talk control is set to latch: a control that overrides the net is not one to leave open.
Priority traffic¶
A pursuit starts. Pri Traf on the action bar marks the channel as working an incident: three beeps play on every radio listening to it, a reminder tone follows every so often, and the card shows PRI TRAF on every board while the in-game radios show PRI at the top of the display. Press it again to release.
It marks every channel you are primed on, not just the one your selector is on. An operator working a pursuit usually has the primary talkgroup selected and its neighbors in an Msel, and all of them are carrying the incident.
Nobody is blocked from talking. This is the part people expect to work the other way: a unit who keys up on a channel in priority traffic gets the channel exactly as they always would. It works the way it does on a real net, by telling everybody the channel is busy, not by locking them out. What it buys you is that anybody who does not need the channel knows to stay off it.
It is not the panic button. No alarm card appears, nobody has to knock it down, and nothing about talk power changes. If you need to be heard over a conversation already running, that is PRI PTT above; if somebody is in trouble, that is Panic.
You release your own. A dispatcher can release somebody else's (useful when the unit who declared it is busy driving) and it releases itself if the radio that declared it drops off the net.
Who is allowed to declare it is a community setting: On-air rules → Priority traffic, which offers anybody on the air (the default), dispatchers and admins, or admins only. The same panel sets how often the reminder tone repeats: 30 seconds by default, or 0 for the three beeps and nothing after. The reminder never plays over somebody talking.
Transmit timeout cuts a stuck microphone. You get a countdown banner before it does.
Channel keys¶
Every channel has a key that primes it, printed on the card. Channels you have not assigned take 1–0 in board order; set your own on the card and it follows the channel wherever it sits.
Set one deliberately when a channel matters: numbering purely by board position means "3" is whatever sorts third, and one new channel in the wrong zone renumbers half your board mid-shift.
The same modifiers work here as on a click; that is the whole point of them. 3 primes, Shift+3 scans, Ctrl+3 monitors, Alt+3 opens the card. Learn it once with the mouse and you already know the keyboard.
Banks, for a board bigger than ten¶
Ten digits cannot address thirty channels, so they address ten at a time. [ and ] step the digits back and forward a bank, and every card re-prints the digit it currently answers to, so you never count, you read.
Keys you assigned are not banked. Those are you saying "this channel is always on this key", and a key that only worked on the right bank would not be that.
Banks are not remembered between sign-ons. The digits always start at the top of your board.
On Base Station and Handset the digits address the tab or page you are looking at. Those boards show one folder at a time, so the ten keys run across the channels in front of you and renumber as you step between pages: a digit never primes something that is off screen. Net Control shows every zone at once, so its digits run across the whole board, which is the same rule: they address what you can see.
Jumping between pages¶
On Base Station and Handset the numpad goes straight to a folder: Num 1 is the first, Num 2 the second, and Num 0 brings every folder back. F1 and F2 still step back and forward, which is what you want on a keyboard with no numpad.
The number row is deliberately not used for this. Those ten keys address channels, and Shift, Ctrl and Alt with them mean the same four things they mean with a click; a modifier that meant one thing on the mouse and another on the keyboard would undo the one rule that makes the grammar learnable. The numpad is a second number row nothing else uses, and it is far enough from the first that a page and a channel cannot be confused by a hand in the wrong place.
Press F9 on either board and the command reference lists your own folders against their keys.
Monitor¶
On conventional, direct and receive-only channels, Monitor holds the squelch open.
A transmission too weak or too degraded to break squelch is not merely noisy. It is silent. Monitor trades the noise floor for hearing everything on the channel. It is the same button a real console has, and it is absent on trunked talkgroups because a trunked radio has no such control.
Recall¶
Each card keeps its last four transmissions, replayable from the expanded card. An operator who missed a plate reaches for the last call on that channel, which is why recall is per resource rather than one flat list.
Recall lives in your browser
These clips are held in this tab and die when you disconnect. They are not the archive.
Cards or a list¶
Every console shows the board two ways, and it is the same choice on all three — Net Control calls them Tiles and List, Base Station calls them Tiles and Rows, Handset calls them Grid and List. Pick one and it follows you between consoles.
Cards is the board you know: each zone is a full-width band in its agency color, with its channels flowing underneath it and as many across as your monitor has room for. Click the band's name to fold the zone away; it stays folded across shifts, and it still says ON AIR while it is shut.
The list is one dense line per channel — key, name, talkgroup, what it is doing, and RX / SCN / TX — for a board too big to scan as cards, or for a second monitor. Everything works exactly as it does on a card: a click primes, Shift+click scans, Ctrl+click monitors, right click opens the channel, middle click mutes it and Alt+wheel sets its level.
Bands is gone
Base Station and Handset used to have no second arrangement at all, and Net Control's was Bands. Every zone is a band now on the card board, so that choice had stopped being a choice. If you worked in bands, you are on Tiles — which is what bands had become.
Patch and multi-select¶
They are one keystroke apart and they are not the same thing.
- Patch joins talkgroups so their members hear each other. It is a real, shared thing that outlives the console that made it.
- Multi-select means you transmit to several channels at once. The members do not hear each other, and it dies with your selection.
Both panels say which one they are.
Making a patch¶
Press Patch on the board: beside Select on Net Control, in the patch grid on Base Station, in the function keys on Handset. The board goes into patch mode, and from then on clicking a card adds it to the patch you are building instead of opening or priming it. Picked cards outline in teal and take a number.
A bar across the top of the board lists what you have picked. Click a channel's chip in that bar to take it back out, then press Patch to put it up. Nothing goes live until you do, and Cancel leaves without patching anything.
Your transmit selection is not touched by any of this. Patch mode has its own picks, so priming channels to talk on them and joining channels together stay separate decisions.
A patch is one channel¶
Once it is up, the patched channels behave as a single big channel:
- everyone on any of them hears everyone else;
- only one person can talk at a time across the whole patch: key up while somebody on any patched channel is talking and you are refused, exactly as if you had both been on the same talkgroup all along;
- every card in the patch lights while that traffic is going out, including ones you never primed, because your voice really is on them.
Drop the patch and they go straight back to being their own separate channels.
Changing or dropping one¶
A patched card carries a teal P badge with the patch's number. Click it to open that patch: the bar comes back with its channels already picked, so you can click another card to add one or click a chip to remove one, then press Save. The patch keeps its number and its audio never lapses, which is why this beats dropping it and building a new one.
Drop is in that same bar. The patch panel in the rail also lists every patch with Edit and a drop button beside it, for when you simply want it gone.
Every console shows what is patched, in its own way: Net Control has the Patch tab in the right rail, Base Station has the numbered slots in its left rail, and Handset lists Active patches under the talk bar with each patch's channels named. All three open the patch rather than dropping it; dropping changes what everybody on those channels hears, so it sits behind opening the thing first.
What cannot be patched¶
- Restricted channels. They are isolated deliberately, and patching one would widen who can hear it.
- Direct (car-to-car) channels. These are radio-to-radio and never pass through the system, so there is nothing in the path to patch them with, and they are what the field uses to talk without the center.
Both are still shown on the board but cannot be picked, with the reason on hover.
Emergency alarms¶
When a radio declares an emergency (the orange button on an in-game handheld or car head), a red bar goes across the top of every console in the community and the alarm's channel card starts flashing. It does not go away on its own, and it does not go away when they stop talking. An alarm is not a transmission.
Two different things take it down, and the difference matters:
| Acknowledge | "I have seen it", at your position only. The bar stops flashing and stays up. Other dispatchers still see theirs, because all of them have to see it. |
| Clear emergency | Emergency knockdown: takes the alarm down on every console and gives up the unit's priority talk power. It lives inside the alarm drawer rather than on the bar, so silencing your own screen is never one mis-click from telling the center it is over. |
Open the drawer with the N active button on the bar to see every alarm, who raised it, which resource it is on and whether it came from a console or an in-game radio. Clearing needs a role that can work a console; everyone else sees the alarm and can acknowledge it.
While an alarm is up, that unit holds priority talk power: they override whoever is speaking and cannot be walked over.
Inspecting a row¶
Click any row in the activity log and the footer spells it out: the full callsign, the full channel name, the time, how long the transmission ran and whether there is a clip. The columns truncate on a narrow rail, and a log that can tell you something happened but not what is not much of a log.
The Len column carries how long each transmission ran, including the ones on channels you were not monitoring; those are the ones you are usually asking about.
Rows with a clip carry a play button. Replay goes through the same receive chain a live transmission does, so it sounds like the radio it arrived on rather than like a file. The recording itself is kept clean, and the radio character belongs to the receiver. Playing a second clip stops the first.
On the History page in the admin side, playback and download both do this, and both play at the signal the unit actually had: a call from a dead spot comes back muddy and clipped rather than cleaned up. A console key-up has no signal to lose, so those play back clean, which is how they sounded.
The file kept on the server stays untouched either way. The download is a rendered copy.
Reading back one channel¶
Click a row's channel to narrow the log to that channel alone, and click the chip that appears in the header to widen it again. It is a filter and it hides rows, so the header names what you are looking at and the footer says the log is narrowed rather than pretending the net has gone quiet.
Clicking a channel card on the board does not do this: a click on a card primes it, on every skin, and that is the one thing it should keep meaning.
On the net¶
The right-hand roster lists every radio on the net. Somebody holding a console and an in-game handheld appears twice, because those are two radios. Each row carries the callsign, the radio ID, and what that unit is transmitting on and monitoring.
Fixing a callsign from the roster¶
If you hold manage_identities (owner or admin), a callsign on this roster is editable in place. Click it, retype it and press Enter; Esc cancels, and clicking away commits. It is the same change as editing their line on People, made without leaving the board, and it is how you fix a unit who signed on as the wrong ID.
A dispatcher does not hold that capability and sees the roster as plain text: a dispatcher works a position, an admin runs the community. A position name is never editable here: that is the desk, and it belongs to the Positions screen. When somebody is signed on at a position, their own callsign sits on the detail line underneath, and that is what the rename reaches.
Blanking a callsign is not offered on the roster, because the board prints the resolved name and cannot show you what it would fall back to. Clear it on their line under People instead.
They share one pane with two tabs, because they are the two things that must never be confused and putting them a screen apart is how somebody builds the wrong one. The tab strip names both, and each says on its face which it is.
The tone board¶
Fires a tone at whatever you have primed. Alert tones, two- and three-beep, station paging tones, SOS and evacuation ship by default; owners can upload their own.
A tone obeys channel discipline exactly as your voice does: a busy channel refuses it.
Emergency tones are grouped and guarded¶
An owner can tick Emergency against any tone in Alert tones. Panic, SOS and evacuation tones are the obvious candidates.
On every console skin those tones then sit below a break of their own, in the danger color, and they have to be held for about half a second to send rather than clicked. The button fills as you hold it, and letting go before it fills sends nothing.
Nothing else about the tone changes: it still goes out on every primed channel and a busy channel still refuses it. The guard is only about how easy it is to send one by accident, in a bank of buttons that otherwise all look alike.
PulseRadio cannot work out which of your tones are the serious ones. The names are yours, and a tone called "Panic 1" on one board is a routine alert on another, so nothing is marked for you. New and existing boards start with every tone unmarked.
Speakers¶
Add named speakers in Position settings and point each at an output device, then assign channels to them from any card. Primary dispatch in the headset, the county TAC on the desk speaker.
Once you have more than one, every card carries an S1 / S2 badge saying which speaker it comes out of, or MUTE when it comes out of nothing, and Position settings grows a Channel audio assignment table: every channel, its speaker, its volume and its mute in one grid. Routing is a decision about the whole board, and auditing it by expanding thirty cards is the kind of thing nobody does.
Board keys¶
F-keys show, letters do. The function keys change what the board is showing: the PulseCAD Dispatch convention, so the two products do not fight in your muscle memory. Everything you do under pressure is a letter under your left hand, because your right hand is on the mouse.
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| F1 | Net Control: the card board. Base Station and Handset: step back a folder tab or page. |
| F2 | Net Control: the list. Base Station and Handset: step forward a folder tab or page. |
| F6 | Position settings |
| F8 | Close what is open: every expanded card on Net Control, the channel sheet on the other two. |
| F9 | Command reference |
| / | Quick find |
| P | Patch mode |
| T | Priority traffic |
| A | Acknowledge alarm, yours only, never the center's |
| M | Master mute |
| Backspace | Unprime everything |
| [ / ] | Step the digit keys a bank |
| Esc | Back out one layer |
Everything is rebindable in Position settings, and all of it is ignored while you are typing in a field or while a dialog is open.
Keys the board has claimed are taken from the browser, so F1 does not open browser help and Ctrl+3 does not jump you to a browser tab mid-shift. Keys the board has not claimed behave normally: Ctrl+R still reloads.
You do not have to remember any of them. F9 opens the command reference, every key and control this position answers to, on one page: your talk control and your priority talk control, each channel's prime key and any talk key you have given it, every board command, and what the buttons on a resource card do. It reads your own bindings rather than printing the shipped defaults, so what it shows is what your board actually does. F9 closes it again, as does Escape. Every skin carries it; on Base Station and Handset the button is marked KEYS.