MDT/ Preplan Software

[DCGRP4]

For those departments who have MDT's, what software are you using for your preplans. Please include how fast it populates and your experience with the product. We use FIREHOUSE, but the occupancy tab seems clumsy. We are investigating alternative sources to accomplish our goal of clear and concise preplans that are readily accessible. Any info would be greatly appreciated.

Chris Tardif
Deputy Chief
East Hartford Fire

[voyager9]

For those departments who have MDT's, what software are you using for your preplans. Please include how fast it populates and your experience with the product.

We use First Look Pro on our MDT's, mainly for the mapping/GPS features. It has pretty extensive preplan tabs that we're just now starting to populate.

I don't have much experience with the preplan side, but the main interface and maps can be pretty slow to load/populate. That may just be our laptops, though. The mapping module does what we need, but visually is outdated compared to commercial GPS and/or Google map interfaces.

[Pelican631]

Because we have no budget for this, we're currently experimenting with using the free version of Google Earth for our mapping and preplanning. We create our preplan documents in Word, convert them to PDF, and then create a link to them in Google Earth at the address in question. We were able to import some of our county GIS data, which made getting the addresses into Google Earth a little easier. We're small and rural so even if we would have had to enter them all in manually it wouldn't have been too bad. We've only been using this system for a few weeks but so far it seems to work pretty well for something that's free.

Andy