Fire Departments in Nova Scotia

Volunteer fire departments in the province of Nova Scotia have a variety of methods of communication at their disposal, ranging from their own "private" frequency, to county-wide and even province-wide radio systems. These methods of communication are described below.

For information specific to Halifax and Cape Breton counties, please scroll to the bottom of this article.

Department "private" frequency

Many departments have one or more of their own "private" frequencies used for paging and dispatching.

These frequencies can be found on the county pages in the database, under the town's name.

Province-wide trunked radio

All fire departments have at least one portable radio capable of communicating on the provincial radio system, the Maritime Public Safety Radio Network (MPSRN).

For the list of talkgroups, please see the database entry here: http://www.radioreference.com/apps/db/?sid=7924#20442

For an explanation on the usage of the talkgroups, please visit the wiki article here.

Provincial VHF fire repeaters (IMRS)

The province maintains a series of VHF repeaters which are part of the old Nova Scotia Integrated Mobile Radio System. Most departments make at least some use of these repeaters, often for dispatching and paging. It would be wise to monitor the IMRS frequency or frequencies in your area just in case.

These frequencies can be found in the Nova Scotia fire frequencies section of the database.

County-wide unified paging systems

Some counties operate their own county-wide communications, dispatching or paging systems. Click on the county name below for a description of those systems.

• Halifax Regional Municipality
• Cape Breton Regional Municipality
• Municipality of East Hants
• Colchester County
• Cumberland County

Province-wide mutual aid frequencies

Most departments also have access to the following province-wide mutual aid frequencies:

Frequency	Type	Alpha Tag	Description	Mode	Tag
153.83000	M	NS Mutual Aid	Province-wide fire mutual aid	FM	Fire-Tac
866.81250	M	NS Fire Simplex	Province-wide fire simplex	FM	Fire-Tac

The mutual aid frequencies are simplex channels often used when multiple departments are responding to the same incident.

These frequencies can also be found in the Nova Scotia fire frequencies section of the database.

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