The beeper pager is still widely used in restaurants, i recently go to massive food court where you can buy from different vendor, and most of them using beeper to call people that their food is ready, it's neat to see the simplest operation still used for 70 years.
@@D3M3NT3Dstrang3r I was in the hospital recently and I found out they switched to apps a long time ago. I was shown whatever app they used when I asked, and it had a lot of functionality. the apps could connect with the many devices from patient rooms.
When I started driving at age 15 in 1996, my first mobile device for my parents to keep tabs on me was a transparent green Motorola beeper. It had a tiny screen on the top edge just big enough to show me the number that was beeping me. My mom would just send 303 for "mom", the 3s being like sideways Ms. I knew to call our landline at home if I got 303 on my beeper. Then, I'd have to hope I still had some quarters left in the center console of my car and find a payphone. My parents would give me a roll of quarters to keep in my car so I'd have no excuse to not call them back. When they first gave me the pager, I wore it tucked inside my jeans pocket with the clip sticking out on the outside. A teacher noticed it and called me to the dean because they thought I was dealing drugs or something. They didn't believe that my parents gave it to me. They confiscated it until they could talk to my mom. This video brought back so many memories I hadn't thought about in decades.
The most popular girl at my junior high had TWO pagers because apparently she had problems with callers getting busy signals with one of them--i definitely remember both clips attached on either side of her short shorts. Why a girl who can't drive needs two pagers was probably more of a status symbol than anything else tho.
We were the same way! Our codes were our birthdays though, and we had other ones for 'call me' and ones to let us know who was going to be picking us up after clubs or sports after school.
Those 80s pagers is iconic, everywhere in the whole world have the same memories about pagers. It is an evolution of communicators, see how we from simple one-way pagers to the modern mobile phone. Also best thing to pagers today is you able to send messages easy, very fun.
In the early 2000's I was selling of Epox pagers in my wireless shop which were completely keypad programmable, both the frequency and capcode. Ahh the good 'ol days. :)
The thing about pager POCSAG is that it usually transmits unencrypted and anyone within a few miles can pick up the signal and demodulate them to read the messages with an SDR. People who use them don't always know this. I've seen people using them to text themselves 2FA verifications thinking it's secure.
Reliable as long as it's a two way to acknowledge the receipt, but one way papers were a hit and miss. If you happen to be in a weak signal area, you simply missed the page.
When I worked at UCLA Medical Center, I was impressed that pagers were still being used, and that I could go on an intraweb site, select a doctor's name by drop-down, and type in a page from my desk.
I worked a hospital, and pagers were still in use for a huge reason, at 433MHz, those things could penetrate into places that 2-ish GHz cellular frequencies couldn't even dream of.... Such as the OR hallways/rooms, anywhere near radiology, or just the basement. All places that cell phones died. This was before Wifi calling, and you still can't get even CLOSE to relying on Wifi Calling.
@@slightlyevolved There was also a brief period in the very early 2000s when pagers seemed like an anachronism but apparently they didn't cause problems with some of the medical equipment or didn't scare people (for lack of better term) like cell phones did. The risk of EMF was known and mitigated with pagers, probably not so as cellphones were just beginning to be in wider use. I very much remember having to turn off my phone in hospitals or otherwise not being permitted to use them everywhere back then.
@@combusean I the early 2000's in the US, analog NAMPS cell phones were still very much a thing (the digital CDMA/TDMA, and to a lesser degree GSM, started to become more popular in sales around mid-2000. In 1999 it was $99 for a StarTac 3000, or $549 for a digital one...). With the much higher power output of NAMPS, I could see that being a worry. Also, even as late as 2007, I could tell when someone had a Nextel and was about to get a call, because it would make a CRT monitor image warp just before it rang.
I’ll never forget when the Motorola flex pagers came out. My boy and I were the only two people in the hood with em. We stood next ti each other and I sent him a text. 5 minutes later he got it. Technology has come a long way!
Last year, I got a bunch of old pagers working using a Raspberry Pi W Zero and RPITX. Definitely have a look at that. I’ve also started playing with Meshtastic too 👍🏻
I used to re-crystal pagers in high school as side job. We'd take trade-ins, I'd re-crystal and retune and off it went to the rental fleet. If memory serves, golay encoding yields a 6 digit cap code and pocsag is 7 digits....
As a bit of a POCSAG nerd myself I still carry a late 90s Motorola that still works ! Thankfully there’s still a few services that support major city’s in the US
I still have an old Motorola POCSAG programming cradle for the Bravo series. I remember there was some weird cap-code limitation where multiple codes programmed into a single pager couldn't be sequential. Instead, they had to increment by a certain value. heh
Never forget getting one in late 90's was only like 5 bucks a month and was like come on mom you will always no where i will be and such. Was great time to be alive she would page me then i would 1-800-collect tell her where i was or where to pick me up and when and hang up lol. dam i miss the 90's
I actually would love it if we would go back to using pagers. I think we've become way too insistent on immediate responses and communication from all people who have a method of contacting us. There are a lot of things I love about having a portable supercomputer in my pocket, but I don't think we actually have the mental architecture required to be in constant contact with people who aren't physically present and be healthy while we do it. The idea of getting a page and then being able to check that when you can reach a landline just sounds so nice and calm to me.
The New South Wales Government are in the process of building a brand new paging network for the emergency services for the RFS, SES, Fire and other gov departments.. the network is designed to stay up during natural disasters. There are also a few networks in the US (eg Spok)… hospitals and some councils in Australia still run paging networks, you can find hundreds of them if you search the correct frequency ranges on the ACMA database.
Pager still work nowadays They are still use because they are simple and can be reliable for long distance communication and use a separate network from cell phones and sms So pagers can still work when your phone has no signal Mainly nowadays emergency and on call services mainly use em along with a cell phone
Atleast in USA You can still plug up a rotary phone to a landline and use it, if it's an actual landline Atleast last I checked pulse dial still worked since I could use dtmf or pulse on my cordless landline That's why you can just hook a speaker and mic, and short some wires on a dial up cord to call someone it also runs on it's own 70-90vac grid So if house loses power you can rig some LEDs for lighting using the phone
Pagers *_do_* use cellular service for connectivity, though... They just don't use "4G" etc LOL The only "pagers" that don't use cellular, are very short-range devices like those used at restaurants, which only work in close proximity to their base station
Great stuff - nice work! I worked in a pager message call centre in the 90s - absolute nightmare! We had a target of at least 600 calls a day, each one lasting seconds ... the occasional call lasting up to a minute while you explained what a pager is and took some abuse for it. This brings it all back! 😉
This was an excellent video, here in italy pagers were called "teledrin", from the word "tele", abbreviation of "telefono", (telephone), and "drin" because of the sound that they made. Everyone remembers that SIP, whitch was the only operator for pagers and phones here in italy, used frequencies that were very close to the ones used by our national television service back then, this caused that in lots of areas that were close to repeters while someone was reciving a pager message and someone else was watching television the television audio would be cut off and you would have been a able to hear the transmission audio instead.
I had the Pageboy ll back in the early 80's...the caller was able to leave a short voice message, but honestly the audio was often so garbled I ended up calling in anyway...to my surprise I learned that they are still in use today by many fire brigades, due to the excellent coverage..Thanks so much for sharing!
I still use a pager every day to respond to emergency incidents with the fire department. We use the POCSAG with the LX4 & LX7. Its a great system because it’s very reliable and the reception is really good!
This brings back memories. In 1982-1983 I was working on the design for the PG32 POCSAG decoder chip. 2800 gates in standard cell. Design toolchain was slow. Manual netlist entry and many hours looking at printouts on green/white paper. Happy days.
They actually have those at a local place I've been to a few times! They're little pucks with your order number displayed on an LCD that vibrate to indicate your order is ready to pick up, cool stuff.
My Grandpa had a pager back in the day and I do remember in the early Y2Ks that cell phone kiosks in the Mall had pagers. They interested me slightly but I ofc was already used to seeing people with PDAs and cellular phones. Pagers were just a bit before my time but it was cool to see the march of technology in real time. The other way I knew about pagers was the Palm VII, VIIx and the i705. These Palm models had a built in pager and you could sign up with Palm and access the web! It sounded pretty wild. It used the Mobitex Pager network. Idk how it worked but it did. So normal Palm applications are in .prc format, these web enabled applets were .pqa and were stuff like email, stocks & weather.
The Palm Treo was arguably the most multifunctional smartphone ever. Had hardware features we can't even get today What I might miss most though, was the rounded square 4pin charging connector you could just knock undone without damaging it!
Your writing and editing skills have improved so much since I started following your channel. No doubt you'd make excellent documentaries about everything and anything that comes to you. Keep up the great work!
Used to love watching tomorrow's world. Some things they got spot on, some things wildly wrong 😂 Thanks mate, love the effort and care that goes into crafting these videos 😊
Love how back then the selling point was the privacy of beepers.. Now they have convinced most to not worry about people knowing everything about you..
Back when I was a teen, beepers were all the rage. In the mid to late 90’s, few people had mobile phones and a teen couldn’t really afford one. These were a reasonable way to at least reach someone if you needed them. They even made beepers targeted to the teen demographic here in the Netherlands. I never carried one myself as I got a phone pretty early.
@14:55 pager doing like an electric football game had me laughing 😂 I used to run a pager-based school zone flasher system. The server would dial a phone number to page the flashers on or off. Typically it did this twice - once just ahead of schedule and once at about the scheduled time to turn it on and at the scheduled time and slightly after to turn it off. Since there was no acknowledgement it was do it twice with fingers crossed. 🙃
What a blast from the past. I had a Motorola alphanumeric pager. I think back then I spent 9.99 a month or maybe 19.99 I just don't remember. Thank you for bringing me back. You got my subscription.
Brings back memories... in '94, one of my responsibilities was a telephony application I wrote that would page people with overdue bills... and they could call back in and get their balance from our OS/2 DB/2 server or get a small reprieve from being shut off. I had a basket full of various pagers on my desk, and every morning and afternoon, I would make sure they beeped and booped on schedule. We had dozens of programing tools for every flavor of pager... most of them where unreasonably finicky. We would open up pagers and unsolder/swap components... and had a device similar to your HackRF... except that it was the size of a large desktop PC. We had kinda ghetto franchises in 20 cities... and probably had most of the drug dealers and prostitutes from the area in our database, so we CONSTANTLY had the police stopping by with subpoenas. Fun times, LOL!
Ah dude, this brings me back. Somewhere in a box in the attic, are a couple of the beepers I had when I was in middle & high school. My whole family had them in the mid '90's, because the cell service at the time was extremely expensive and a handheld mobile wouldn't even last on standby for a whole day. At my first job after high school, I worked in an office supply store and sold the first texting and two-way pagers. Skytel I think, and I probably have one of the very 90's business-centric sales brochures somewhere. We also sold PalmPilots, and I remember someone sold a kit that allowed you to get pages from your Palm device on them.
In Germany, we still have a nationwide paging network on 466 MHz called e*Cityruf, and it's VERY active. Most of the activity is telemetry data and status messages from stuff likes pumps, servers, etc. Great video btw. Always nice seeing old tech brought back to life. I'm actually currently trying to build a POCSAG transmitter and simple pager that uses the 433 MHz ISM band, just for the fun of it^^
I honestly love the idea of a pager. Especially a 2 way one, possibly encrypted too. Im sick of all these different apps to communicate with people. Give me and my close friends and family a pager and lets go back 🎉
That first Motorola you were playing with looks old enough that it might not be pocsag. Golay was the signaling format that was precursor to Pocsag and a lot of early tone only pagers were Golay. Also, changing the frequency on most non synthesized pagers requires not just changing the crystal, but retuning the IF stage, which often means replacing some laser trimmed capacitors with adjustable ones.
Wow, Golay. I hadn't considered that possibility, thanks. I'm still learning about radio and there are many things I don't know. I have seen there are NEC replacement pager crystals available for different frequencies. Is it possible NEC designed these pagers to work on different frequency ranges with just a crystal change? How do amateur radio enthusiasts do it?
@@JanusCycle It would likely work somewhat with just a crystal change, but the sensitivity would be hurt quite a bit. I worked for a pager company in the 90s-2000s and re-crystaled and recapped a lot of Motorola and NEC pagers, we did try just a crystal swap when we first got started but they would never perform that well, so we ended up getting the entire ramsey electronics rig to tune them properly....depending on the RF board there were 1 to 3 IF stages that needed to be tweaked, there are test points on the board and IIRC you have to watch for 455khz with an o-scope or frequency counter and tune it for the strongest signal. There are pagers out there that do use PLL tuners and can simply be programed for a new frequency, but to be honest, by the time these came around, they simply were not as well built as the Crystal stuff, nor did they seem as reliable.
@@PeterBellefleur Thank you! I really appreciate the level of detail you provided here. The more I learn, the more I realise how much I don't know :) I also now have a new appreciation for the crystal pagers over the synthesized oscillators in programmable frequency pagers.
Very cool gadgets. I've never seen a pager in person, they weren't really a thing in my neck of the woods in their era, or at least as far as I can tell. It is interesting to see how they worked and how they were configured. Thanks for another great video!
Amazing! Literally amazing. I think there was a kids toy that had a screen and a RF modem, but I forgot its name, I know it was Russian (or from some Slavic country). You should have a look at it as well!
I have my apollo from my tame as an ambulance officer, it is programmable with many capcodes and freqs from the unit itself. id love a POCSAG encoder so i can setup a local area pager for my family. thanks for giving me the insight into the Hack RF. I decode it all the time here from a Uniden Bearcat with a Mod Tap and decode two freq at both 512 and 1200 baud, 2400 is rare here, also decode MDT from the ambulance, you get some really interesting stuff on the air!
I don't understand anything about technology and I don't even know English very well, but your channel and video are very interesting and always bring me a lot of nostalgia and flashbacks, it should be emphasized that you choose such music that creates an atmosphere
Pagers are still used in the UK for hospitals, fire service (in some areas), status reports from some systems, vetinary surgeons and some other services. Usuall found around 150 MHz and some UHF frequencies. I used to watch messages using old software called pdw and a radio scanner, but you can use an SDR too with a virtual audio cable.
we should have more of this sorta retro tech... turn off all notifications, and use beepers to signal "I want you to do something"! and yes, as been said, some food places use stuff very much like this, it's great, because nowdays you can make 'em super cheap, AND they work well
I like the idea of pagers better than carrying a phone for some strange reason. I mean, my dumbphone is essentially a two way pager that can do calls, but something about one way only is interesting too. That said, I think I like it because it's simple and it's not constantly trying to get my attention, only when I'm needed.
And those two-way pagers with GPS & autorespond features, would be more responsive (& more private) than any "modern" Airtag type asset tracking devices
@@prophetzarquon1922Air tags rely on a network of apple phones with location services and bluetooth turned on 24/7 to even work, you can get GPS trackers that are exactly what you described, they're basically a phone that sends you GPS updates when parameters are met. You can even call them and it'll auto answer and feed the microphone to you so you can hear what's happening. How useful that is for anything but spying I don't know.
I used to program these in the back of my dad’s shop as a kid. The software and hardware wasn’t too bad to use, later on when he started selling cell phones we needed binders full of programming guides ha.
That first Motorola pager you showed is very similar in design and construction as their System Saber, and Astro Saber public safety radios that were available at the time. It actually looks to reuse the belt clip that was optional for the radio. The sabers have two set screws on the bottom, and when loosened the electronics slide out of the housing just like that pager. Seems like they were designed in conjunction, or the pager was the inspiration for the design of the Saber.
This video was beautiful, brilliant and very engaging. I've just been on a Meshtastic search and really want to get some nodes going. I love the Ideal of the 2 way radio in the form of an 80s pager. thanks so much for sharing your journey with these iconic devices
I must have had literally hundreds of these things over time...Also the big bricks by Motorola, with the small led single digit fisheyed red numerical display
This is awesome! I have several NEC 21A, as well as several other POCSAG and I think one FLEX pagers in my collection. Was cool to see the NEC programming software! I might try to revive some of my pagers using the method you show here some day...
This is the kind of thing I need to learn about, thanks. I have also heard about some hams dropping the frequency of pagers from 148 MHz down into the 2 meter band. But I'm not sure if they were crystal controlled.
@@JanusCycleIt’s as simple so long as you aren’t moving it far from the frequency the receiver was intended for, or it will be outside of the bandwidth of the receiver’s front end filters. A ham would typically move these VHF units down to the 2 meter amateur band so then you can transmit to them with power behind it.
As a late 50's IT guy this was infinitely relatable. At the end the pager era we had Motorola Skytel pagers, I still have mine but the weird proprietary battery has passed on. Awesome video, thank you!!!
Amazing video as always. Reminds me I got a skyper in one of my boxes that I also never saw running... Oh well, if you once again inspire me to buy and build strange equipment, I'll be sure to enjoy the journey.
I still feel vindicated when I see an alphanumeric pager (or even a bidirectional pager). In 2001-03 my brother still used his pager even though he had a phone. But he insisted pagers were only numeric, and that for text you needed a phone. I told him up and down I’d seen texting capable ones on the TV, but he said they were probably phones that only looked like pagers haha. I guess all his pals only had the numeric pagers. He kept his pager for a few years after getting a phone because the signal coverage was better, or something. I seem to recall it was gone by 04 though.
My first job I had an alphanumeric pager. There was a email to pager gateway our provider had, so I created scripts that would page me the results of day long compiles so I'd know if I was out for lunch or something that my job failed and I needed to get back early. Fun stuff!
Around 1993 I knew someone with an imported FM radio from Japan which uses different frequency bands than in the USA. It could tune in and listen to USA pager audio transmissions.
Kudos for getting the NEC programming software working! When I tried, i probably oversaw the inverted TTL mode. Looks like I should give it another go :-)
I intercept pager messages here in the UK on 158.350mhz using SDR software and a program called PDW. Some very interesting messages come in very frequently!
Have you noticed the lie about not knowing where a mobile is calling from (police always say that) if the caller doesn't know where they are? Looking like this: "Mobile Phone Coordinates, Closest Area Detected.." - Triangulation used by the emergency services.
I don't know where you in the world but it's common knowledge over here and it's not pin-point. They can get a general area which is enough to say 'you were in the vicinity' if it was a piece of evidence I suppose. Sorry if I repeated back what you just told me lol
Great video!👍 I had a pager back in the early 90s when mobile phones were still too big and impractical to carry around. It could recognize a handful of numbers and receive short messages.
