RFA stands for Revit Family. There are two types of families that you will be concerned with to make your life safety devices.
The first family type is the annotation. This is where you create the 'symbology' that will scale. You start this one with File->new->annotation symbol. Select Generic annotation.rft (this is the family template) when the dialog box comes up. We have been able to import our blocks from AutoCAD and explode them to make our annotations so that the Revit symbols match our AutoCAD symbols.
The second type of family you will need is the fire alarm device family. If you select File->New->family - one of the choices will be "Fire Alarm Device.rft" - this is the actual device template. If you are not intending to use 3D modeling, you can simply load your annotation symbol created above into this family, place the annotation at the 0,0 and load this FA device family into your project.
The problem you ran into when copying a family was with the types within a family. If you click on "family types..." on the left hand side of the screen (depending on how your display is set up andyou have to be editing a family), you will be presented with a list of family types. You can then delete the ones you don't want.
I wouldn't recommend using the speakers to create fire alarm devices - Revit turns objects on and off based on the base family type and if you turn off the speakers, you will lose the bell.
So quick recap - make annotation (the symbol you want to show on the final output) - load that into a FA device you created from the Fire Alarm template, load the Fire alarm device into the project and you will have a 2d symbol that you can later add 3d components to.
