pager decoding

stylers

howye all,

does anyone here monitor the pager frequencies lately ?. I done a bit with it years ago, with the scanner and the poc32 program. Lately, I found an old motorola numerical pager i had lying around for years, so i hacked it apart and managed to get a nice clean digital output from the RF end of it. Not sure what freq its on, but it was on eirpage back then (had a 1550 number on it). I plan to feed the nice clean decoded output to a serial port and then use the excellent looking PDW to decode that. It would save all the messing with soundcard levels etc.

Question is, is there much going on in pager land of late ?. I know some of the ambulance men still use them, but are they still popular with the emergency services ?. I had a look at the eirpage website lately, which looks like the handywork of a 2 year old :eek: . its hard to tell by it if anyones using paging..

Taildragon

I thought these things had gone the way of the LP, VHS cassette and B&W tellys

Just a couple of weeks ago I was talking to a local builder, and noticed that he carried one - remarked how I hadn't seen them in a long time, then remembered that he's also a local fireman.

Were/are the numerical pagers around 178 Mhz? I suppose POCSAG is still around, but SMS has all but trashed it on price/performance. Having said that, I can see why it would still be an appropriate technology for things like local fire stations, hospitals etc.

watty

The pagers are still running. They affect the Cork & Dublin 2M repeaters as they are quite high power.

The pagers are a bit more reliable than SMS. A pager receiver is less likely to go flat. Unlike regular "scanning", I'd be nearly sure that interception of SMS or Pager messages is illegal.

Crazy Ivan

Hi all,

I still hear pager "noise" around 153 - 156MHz so they are still being used in the Galway area at least. I imagine hospitals and such are using them if you are within shot of one. I remember using PDW a few years back and I got good results using the soundcard. Always meant to build an interface but it's getting harder to find laptops etc with serial connections.

I like the "recycling" of an old pager. It sounds like a good experiment and I'm interested in the results. As far as I know however, it is illegal to decode these signals and read messages that are not intended for public broadcast - just a caveat.

stylers

I Know its kinda illegal - but I'm was just planning on making the pager do something usefull, not really bothered about what info is there. If i see a few lines of text - I know the decoder end of it is working.. I'll let ye know if it works..

experimenter

This is quite easy to do, around 153Mhz you will hear traffic.

Mike 1972

The pagers are a bit more reliable than SMS

Are they really.

I mean if someone sends me an SMS message and im out of range it will be stored at the message centre until im back in range

As I understand it witth ordinary pagers the The base stations chuck a maessage out and its the luck of the draw whether one recieves it or not

(Granted 150 MHz signals are likely to give better coverage than 960/1800/2100 MHz cellphone transmissions)

Theres also some hospital paging on 27MHz (despite the obvious risk of interference from CB)

watty

The coverage is more reliable. Better building penetration
150Mhz is up to 100km coverage compared with 10km, 5km 2km typical max on 900, 1800 and 2100MHz phone systems.