The WA Police Service as a part of it's CADCOM (Computer Aided Dispatch and Communications) project is changing the radio callsign system very shortly.
Information sourced from the WA Police Website gives us the following details:
The current callsign system is "full" and there's no room for expansion
It is difficult to determine which district or station a callsign is based in
A new format had to be designed to support the new technologies that CADCOM is based upon
The new callsign will contain two letters and three numbers in the format District (1 letter), Station (1 letter), Duty Type (1 digit) and Vehicle Number (2 digits).
The police publication Newsbeat gives this example: A car in Leederville in the Perth district would have the first letter as "P" and the second letter as "L". If it were a traffic vehicle then the duty type would be the digit "2" and then the last two digits would identify which traffic car it was at Leederville (e.g. "01"). So the full callsign for that particular car would be PL201.
Special sections of the Police Service will also have their own callsigns in a similar structure to the system above. The example given in Newsbeat is of a Major Incident Group (MIG) vehicle. It is part of the Crime Investigation Support Portfolio, so it's "district" would be "C" and it's part of the Major Crime Division which would be the "station" of "D". MIG takes the duty type of "5" and so the first car in that division would have the combined callsign of CD501.
(All the above
data has been
sourced from public information
on the WA Police Service website)
Monday 5th February 2001
Today was the first day of the new callsigns being used. At 6:00am, the change of shift, all callsigns throughout WA changed to the new system. WARSUG is proud to be one of - if not the - first with comprehensive information on the new callsign system. You can download the appropriate PDF document on the previous page.
The new callsigns were given a "baptism of fire" - literally! The large bushfire in Neerabup from the previous day flared up again and cars from all over the Joondalup district were called in for traffic control and road blocks, etc.
There was a small amount of confusion heard on the radio as some callsigns were duplicated and other callsigns weren't known at all but it was all sorted out pretty quickly as the need for consistent communications was urgently required.
I have noticed that even on this first day, they're starting to take shortcuts in the new callsigns when they're in a hurry - I've mainly been monitoring the Joondalup channel due to the bushfire and quite often they drop the first character from the call - so November Whiskey One Zero One becomes just Whiskey One Zero One. I suspect though that there is a concerted effort by everyone to be as "correct" as possible today, but occasionally it just slips through.
One regular mis-call is when a station radio calls. We still hear Joondalup Base a lot instead of November Whiskey One Hundred...
My initial impressions of the new callsign system is that it's actually quite easy to understand. It saves having to remember each individual callsign and where it's from. Once you do a quick mental translation (i.e. cars in the 100 range are the equivalent of Sierras, 200 range are Tangos, etc) it's quite good.
Of course, it's going to take a little getting used to, but early signs are promising.
-- Zebedee.
Thursday 10th January 2002
Well, after roughly a year of listening to the new callsigns, all the fuss and confusion seems to have mainly died down.
The only issue now is reconciling the callsigns with the vehicles that are on the road - even after a year, not all of the cars are displaying new callsign letters. Some cars still have the "old-style" callsigns showing.
To the frequent scanner listener, it's been fairly easy to memorise the new callsigns - at least most of the major ones anyway. It's especially useful when a vehicle comes up on a channel that's out of it's normal operating area - very handy to find out when there's something going on! :-)
Hopefully, I can get someone else to contribute some more thoughts on the new callsigns. Stay tuned!
-- Zebedee