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.
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.
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.
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 👍🏻
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
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....
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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! 😉
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!
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.
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.
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 😊
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!
@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. 🙃
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!
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^^
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.
I still carry a pager on me all the time, it's a Swissphone Boss 925. I'm a voluntary firefighter in Germany and this is how most of us get called into action. Already digital and encrypted but currently there is a switch towards the Swissphone s.Quad. They use the Tetra Radio network which is also used for all of the emergency radio services in Germany.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 🎉
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.
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 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
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!!!
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 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.
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.
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!
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!
Next step- upgrade the battery to a rechargeable lithium ion and have usb c charging. Honestly, great job on this video. I was going to bring up pagers with the ham club as one of the programs, and i literally just found my old Motorola pager. Thanks for the content. 🤙🏾
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!
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...
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 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.
I've been monitoring POCSAG traffic in Sweden for years. I modified two Motorola pagers to use as dedicated receivers. I also wrote my own POCSAG decoder for Linux. Sadly this past year I've noticed more and more encrypted pages (128-bit IDEA encryption from what I've been able to figure out). I guess the paging company is aiming to transition all pagers to encrypted varieties. Well, it was fun while it lasted.
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
I just wanted to comment on what i consider awesome captioning right from the start. Spock's lines in the captions bein broken up as quotes for individual lines is perf; esp bcuz it captures that each of these lines is said separately while maintainin it all as one sentence, without requirin any added periods or commas or the like A+ work on the caption game, even before gettin into the rest of the vid; i know this channels worth subbin to for that attention to detail for captions
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 use a pager today worldwide using DAPNET with Amateur Radio. I can sent a page via the App to any pager or to many pagers. You just need to be a radio amateur and be in range of a transmitter. I use a Pi-Star Jumbo spot.
the weird thing about the NEC pager(the one with the display) is that,one of the chips uses the new logo,despite the obvious use of the old one,not that it effects anything at all
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
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.
The old Post Office code still in use today!
@@JanusCycleten years ago in school one of my classmates had a pagers with display because he was (and very likely still is) volunteer firefighter.
fire service too
Pagers are also still very heavily used in medicine. Easy enough to use the hack rf and software to receive and decode the messages too.
@@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.
Awesome story, thanks so much for sharing that!
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.
do you remember sprint calling cards?
@@SirDadbod ua-cam.com/video/ikosHDgo4Sc/v-deo.html :)
I adore seeing old tech working again, those eureka moments when you get it working again is just ❤
It was awesome to see these working, glad you enjoyed this :)
Hell yea
What's your 411? Ahh it's 911! Remember those codes? lol
Thanks for the shout out! And for the always great videos on retro tech.
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.
Yeah they used to use phones to control pagers but this is basically how it was done when there was a computer available
In Germany some volunteer firefighters still use pagers. Though they are being replaced by apps slowly.
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 designed pagers for Philips in the late 1980s. It was a great experience, gave me the tools for designing low power IoT devices 40 years later :)
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.
Those sidekicks and blackberries were amazing...followed by nextel chirp...i was gadget guy for real..
I worked for a defense contractor up until about a year ago. I used to have to admin our pagers. They're very good for reliability in 2024.
"defense"
Sorry, I couldn't help it.
@@qwertykeyboard5901huh?
D-FENS!
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.
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 👍🏻
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
Thanks for the great content! Always love the content
I appreciate the compliments, thanks.
@@bryan-k2b I would like to do more with really old phones.
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
I clicked one link, and now UA-cam is convinced that I want to see all pagers and beepers content there is. I'm not complaining, this is awesome
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....
Yes you're correct
Maybe the first Motorola I took apart is golay.
Now that would be awesome video to watch...I'm fascinated with all that...my biggest fascination is knots right now
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
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
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 FCC ID number should lead you to the FCC "OET" database, which should give you a lot of relevant information, and often a user manual.
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.
Absolutely glorious video. Incredible cohesion, concise juxtapositioning, superb payoff. 10/10
Thanks Budgiebrain994, I always appreciate your support.
Ahhhh pagers... the meshtastics of the 80s
Your order is ready, please return to the service counter. 😁
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.
Functionally very different; those have no service once you leave the immediate proximity of their base unit. Not the same as a cellular pager
is it really cellular? the frequency looks quite low, more like fm range. @@prophetzarquon1922
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.
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.
Wow! very early days for POCSAG there
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! 😉
"My beeper ain't working...." - ahh the specifics of that complaint. lol
@@BillAntProbably because the network was on the way out, and we couldn't be bothered fixing the downed radios ...
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!
Oooh, ol Big Bob Pataki's gonna love this.
I am so glad I have stumbled upon this channel, it is rare these days to see someone as passionate about technology and its' history.
Good to have you here, thanks for watching!
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.
The late 90s were an amazing time :)
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.
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 😊
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.
Those Palm models with radios are really interesting, I'm keen to try one out some day.
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!
❤ Calm & relaxing voice. Always interesting tech being reviewed. It's one of my favorite channels 😍
@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. 🙃
Great, now I have a ridiculously strong urge to own a functional pager for no reason. Thanks for another great video, you never disappoint!
Good luck connecting it to the cellular networks of today's US...
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!
I really appreciate hearing that. I really enjoy exploring tech and I've been working hard at learning how to bring that experience out on video.
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^^
These old things are way more interesting than modern stuff. These days it's just a cheap computer blob inside a cheap plastic box
Another great upload from Janus! I've always been interested in pagers.
I had exposure to these through my dad who had beepers and pagers. He worked on call for the E&WS. Naturally they were all Motorola models.
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.
i love your videos so much, can't wait to see you play with meshtastic with us
I still carry a pager on me all the time,
it's a Swissphone Boss 925.
I'm a voluntary firefighter in Germany and this is how most of us get called into action. Already digital and encrypted but currently there is a switch towards the Swissphone s.Quad. They use the Tetra Radio network which is also used for all of the emergency radio services in Germany.
you know its gonna be a good one when you come home to a fresh Janus drop
The pagers I know from the 90s had sim cards and when someone called it showed the number. Some could receive SMS too.
glad you're so KEEN to tinker with these, was fun watching!
I remember wanting a beeper as a kid because they always looked so cool in the movies.
Your content is such quality Janus. I get excited every time you're in my feed.
Awesome, I'm pleased to hear that :)
As far as I know there's no one else doing this kind of retro pager goodness on youtube so thank you!
Dude! My Meshtastic board is coming in tomorrow. So excited to use it. Man, i love your stuff! Keep up the good work dude.
I hope you enjoy your new Meshtastic node :)
@@JanusCycle absolutely dude. I hope to perhaps comms with you one day man, if long distance comms works out soon haha.
All your page are belong to us. Lol. Great video. I had all of these in the 80s/90s. The two-way Motorola pager was awesome. Texting in the 90's!
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.
Great video! I remember carrying the type with the LC display.
Later I carried the type that could display whole sentences!
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!
In the Netherlands, we still use Pagers for the whole country for the emergency services called P2000.
they use capcodes for the stations.
Well, this was a fun surprise. Your content keeps throwing me back to my youth, so happy to support, even a little. Thanks!
I'm very glad you are enjoying the channel. Thank you so much for your support.
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.
Awesome, I hope you enjoy some of the other videos as well.
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.
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 🎉
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 loved my pager. I had a Swatch watch pager that got me through university.
14:00 you are a man of culture.
;)
Love that vibrate setting. Back when you could feel it.
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.
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
bring the whole 80s back!
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
I'm really glad you enjoyed this and appreciate the music.
Not 30 years! I was a courier up until sometime in 2000 and we received jobs on a pager with basic monochrome display. IIRC it was a Motorola.
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!!!
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
Best retro tech youtuber!
:)
I had a few back in the day one for every member of my family members
I work in telecoms, there is still lots of paging transmission equipment in service!
It's not always as simple as just swapping the crystal, a lot of the support circuitry will likely be assuming the crystal is what it is
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.
@@JanusCycle 2m is 144-148mhz, so i guess its pretty close. Time to pass your liscence haha
@@fazejohncenachristogamerfaze absolutely!
Damn, posted 2 hours ago! Glad I found it. You earned yourself a subscribe, sir
Awesome, thanks!
I loved my Motorola LX4. Brilliant device.
I’m the telecom guy for a county government in the US. I still have a couple of departments that use pagers.
All I can picture in my head when I see these is the GTA original soundtrack playing in polyphonic while I'm speeding around in my red Banshee 😭
Born 96 so that's my only exposure to pagers (GTAIII)
Great game :)
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.
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!
great to hear from a POCSAG enthusiast :)
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!
Next step- upgrade the battery to a rechargeable lithium ion and have usb c charging. Honestly, great job on this video. I was going to bring up pagers with the ham club as one of the programs, and i literally just found my old Motorola pager. Thanks for the content. 🤙🏾
I hope you get yours working again.
USB C batteries are a thing, and perfect for these pagers, allowing for a modern charging interface without modifications to the pagers themselves
@@LouisSubearth I was just thinking about those. You gotta love the advancements in battery tech in the past few years. Right on. 🤙🏾
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!
Awesome story, thanks!
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...
The NEC 21A is a very cool model. I wish I had one. And easy to program.
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!
The Cybiko? I heard about those a few years ago and they seemed to be quite the thing for the era they were released.
Cybiko!
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.
I've been monitoring POCSAG traffic in Sweden for years. I modified two Motorola pagers to use as dedicated receivers. I also wrote my own POCSAG decoder for Linux. Sadly this past year I've noticed more and more encrypted pages (128-bit IDEA encryption from what I've been able to figure out). I guess the paging company is aiming to transition all pagers to encrypted varieties. Well, it was fun while it lasted.
Well, with the right ASICs...
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
I just wanted to comment on what i consider awesome captioning right from the start.
Spock's lines in the captions bein broken up as quotes for individual lines is perf; esp bcuz it captures that each of these lines is said separately while maintainin it all as one sentence, without requirin any added periods or commas or the like
A+ work on the caption game, even before gettin into the rest of the vid; i know this channels worth subbin to for that attention to detail for captions
Thank you. I really pleased the effort I put into captioning is appreciated.
Fascinating
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 :-)
That was really difficult to work out. But easy once I knew what was going on.
An excellent video as always!
well, thank you :)
all your page are belong to us :) well done - good old telecom logo
I use a pager today worldwide using DAPNET with Amateur Radio. I can sent a page via the App to any pager or to many pagers. You just need to be a radio amateur and be in range of a transmitter. I use a Pi-Star Jumbo spot.
the weird thing about the NEC pager(the one with the display) is that,one of the chips uses the new logo,despite the obvious use of the old one,not that it effects anything at all
I kinda like the old NEC logo a bit more, but the new one is cool too.
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
Very nice. Just what I was looking for a couple of weeks ago.
Me and a friend had pagers from a hotel that we got from some unique way and used them for a few months for free.
You should have a million subs. People dont know what is good for them. Greetings from Radelaide!
Thanks, one of the greatest cities in the world!