Prior to scan-lock sirens & the advent of online buy/sell/trade groups, Unitrols were primarily exclusive to the west coast. GE Powercalls were the go-to on fire apparatus in the midatlantic region, and were also used by Philly PD in the 70s & 80s. I'll also add in Signal-Stat & Scientific Prototypes Mk 5/7/10 used heavily in NY metro in the 80s.
Hope this answers your questions.
Thank you! It definitely clarifies things, as do all of the replies. Just on account of old COPS episodes filming in California, I always called the Unitrol wail "the American police siren". I also remember the Philly episodes of COPS having a Sergeant using the Powercall. First time that I ever heard the Warble tone and loved it.
Where I live, ambulances and fire engines use wail most of the time and yelp when going through a red light. The police usually use wail only. Most of the sirens I hear are Whelen, although the fire department has some older trucks with PA300s.
It's almost entirely Whelen around here. A couple of the older OPP vehicles here still have Intimidators, but they're getting very few and far between since OPP switched over to Sapphire not too long ago. I believe that it's Sapphire as they're using an 18 button control head with a single button replacing the slide switch. The city police,
FD and
EMS have all used Whelen for ages although I think that the police used SmartSirens in the very early 2000s. In retrospect, I seem to remember that as a teenager, whenever the police bleeped the air horn at us, it sounded like a SmartSiren air horn.
I don't know what exact systems they currently use, but after posting a thread asking about it, it looks like
EMS here uses the 295HFSA7. I think that it's possible that they also use the 295SDA1 as well. I remember seeing a few rigs with a control head that looked like it, but that was ages ago, so my memory of it is a bit spotty. Thanks to help from a fellow ELB member in identifying a siren, it looks like
EMS used the SVP SA-441 Magnum prior to that.
As for police and
FD, no clue what tones or systems besides them being Whelen. They've upgraded their vehicles and vehicle equipment again and they've always used top-end stuff, so it'd likely be Carbide or CanTrol. They'd be a nice match for
FD's Legacies and police's Liberty IIs
. As for sirens,
FD seems to do what it wants, to a certain extent. No Warble tones, but they're the only agency that uses any form of "Alternate" Whelen tone or any of Whelen's other variants of wails or yelps. Alternate Yelp on a command truck and other wail/yelp variants used on other vehicles. As for police, no clue. The wail that they use doesn't sound like the standard Whelen wail. Higher-pitched. I suspect it's one of the Wail 850-1700 tones. The used to use Simulated Mechanical as well as Mechanical Manual Stop.
EMS used the mechanical tone around the same time. It was popular in this immediate region in the mid-late 2000s. The police use a different yelp as well,
IIRC. Not the Alternate Yelp. Maybe Yelp B or Y225 or Y249.
I've posted video of an cruiser very briefly running its siren. Older video as it's a
CVPI with the old style of markings, but the tone sounds the same as what's used now. Scroll to 0:38 to see it. The rest is of the video fairly slow standoff with robots breaking things, ESU officers crowding the Fatal Funnel (they excel at this) and ESU guys breaking things (ditto). A lot of very big guys that a retired Inspector described to me as "cement heads".
Still can't figure out why the Unitrol-style wail doesn't seem to be used in Canada. Maybe it sounds "too American" for police services' liking
?
Aforementioned Inspector told me that up to around 1983-84, the police service in London, Ontario didn't wasn't even issued sirens. They had lighting, but no sirens. This was due to their upper brass all being old officers from the UK that thought them to be unnecessary and "too American". They thought the same about the officers carrying more than six rounds of ammunition total.
Back in the 80's, we went with North American sirens. They had the riot mode which cleared traffic beyond belief.
I saw a YouTube video of an old North American siren. Beautiful old-school sound. Nowadays, I think that the Riot mode would panic most motorists. That or it'd be the only tone that could get them to put down their cellphones. It doesn't sound nice, but I think that's the point. It's like the siren tone equivalent of one mean-looking biker walking through a crowd of people. Everyone's going to move.