In Reply to: Re: Medstar posted by Mike Baker on June 21, 2000 at 12:07:43:
After spending nearly three weeks in Eastern WA for a national sailplane contest (based at EPH airport), here's an update to the Medstar situation.
Medstar operates 3 helicopters for medical airlift in E WA, Idaho and Western Montana. It looks like the two primary Spokane hospitals sponsoring MedStar are Deaconess and Samaritan. Despite their website statement that they operate 3 'copters, a Medstar 4 'copter started broadcasting about 10 days after the start of my stay there, and the radio operator was talking about using MedStar 4 for training flights.
From their website comes the following:
"MedStar utilizes three TwinStar helicopters, two of which are based in Spokane, and a third based in Moses Lake, WA to transport patients from rural hospitals to various referral centers in the region, as well as to transport patients directly from the scene of an accident or medical emergency. We also utilize two Cessna Conquest II fixed wing aircraft for longer flights or when weather does not allow helicopter flights." (web site is http://www.nwmedstar.org/ )
The nomenclature distinguising MedStar 1-4 and where based it not yet clear. Twice I heard flights in Ephrata's hospital where the 'copter clearly lifted off from Moses Lake. In one case, Medstar 2 was the callsign and in the other it was MedStar 2. So, they may be doing some equipment rotation.
An outstanding feature of MedStar is their repeater system on 463.175 (monitoring the 462.975 listed here produced no comms at all and 155.295 also no comms). Obviously, significant altitude of their repeater site as I can easily hear their comms from the chopper as it crosses the ID-Montana border.
They also broadcast GPS position reports about every 10 minutes.
An unfortunate aspect, however, is that they rarely refer to actual frequencies they are switching to so they can have comms with the local fire departments on the ground. Instead, at least 95% of these types of comms for emergencies consisted of the MedStar dispatcher telling the 'copter crew to switch to Channel 4 or Channel 16, or whatever to maintain comms with the ground units. So, they obviously have a master list of the local FD freqs and thus do rarely broadcast the actual frequency and PL tone to use. Of course, for a close-in situation, just scanning the local FDs will get that info but I guess I was getting spoiled by the Airlift NW practice in Western WA of giving out the actual freqs and PLs.