Hi Mike how are things in Idaho.  I used to have in laws that lived
there but never did much diving while I was there.
   I notice that you are having some trouble getting air fills.  There
are a couple of solutions that we have used in the past and some
cautions to be wary of.  If you are going to get air from a fire station
you have to be careful that you are getting compressed air and not a
mixxed breathing mixture designed for firefighters.  If the fire station
fills from a cascade system, ie a series of large DOT travel cylinders
connected together, they may be using a gas mix and not compressed air.
You have to ask to be sure what you are getting.  Additionally, you may
have to purchase the appropriate filling adaptor if you use a fire
station as the Scott packs use a different adaptor that does SCUBA in
some cases.  These units can be very high pressure and have to be filled
carefully so as not to exceed the pressure of your tanks.  Medical gas
suppliers may be better than welding gas suppliers for breathing air but
you may pay more for the gas than at a welding shop.
    The solution that we had to settle on at one point was to purchase a
DOT cascade filling system so that we could fill our own tanks at one
particularly remote site that we did a lot of diving one at one point.
In this system you fill up the entire system and then fill your tanks as
you need them.  Down the raod when the system empties you go back and
fill it up again.  The upside to this is that you only have to go to the
fill station when the cascade gets empty.  The downside is that you need
to get properly trained to use the system and have to get other
componants, such as a water tank, before you can safely fill tanks.  You
have to maintain the cascade tanks just as you would any other
compressed air cylinder with inspections and hydro's.  You also have to
be careful to follow the save restrictions that a regular fill station
follows and not cut corners with requiring the cylinders that you fill
be up to specks on testing as well.  The temptation can be great to let
certain things slide but you can't.
   At any rate I wish you luck.
Dennis
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