Wanted — a long and loud text alert for emergency paging

[rwheeler]

I have just started working for a voluntary organisation for which I will routinely be on-call. The group uses mobile phone texting as a way of paging members who are on duty. The problem is that the text message alert on my current mobile phone is so short and feeble that I often miss it—especially at night when it is far too quiet to wake me up. My current mobile phone is a Vodafone VDF200, the very cheapest in their range to be fair, and it has no setting to change the alert tone on my text messages. I am prepared to change my phone if I could have a way of setting a loud and long tone on the text message alert. Ideally I’d like to be able to prepare my own mp3 file that would be run when I received an incoming text. That way I could control the tone, the volume and the duration of the alarm. Any advice on what model of phone would suit me or what method of configuring my phone would work? Thanks. Rob Wheeler.

[BandOfBrothers]

Hi @rwheeler

I use Zedge which is a free non subscription site for ringtones, text tones and wallpapers. 

In regards to make and model of phone my choice right now is Samsung as it allows quite alot of customisation and holds onto signal very well and is open source. 

I'd suggest to perhaps visit High steet stores to play around with the working demo models and listen to their tones etc too. 

[SimonWilding]

I use Zedge too and some of the tomes available are long and loud. Some phones will also allow you to download a ringtone anfd use that as a message tone, up to 30 seconds long.

There are plenty of cheap Android phones that can be easily customised, and Zedge is avaialble in the Google Play Store for free.