Single channel pager

[kyparamedic]

I'm not sure if this exists commercially, so I'm hoping someone can maybe point me in the right direction. My friend is a police officer as well as a paramedic. While on duty with the PD, he wants to be able to listen to EMS calls without having to have his radio on scan. Is there some kind of cheap, receive only pager he can get? He doesn't need a tone-alert pager like the Minitors, just something small he can put on his belt. I told him he may have to find a used Minitor and set it for open-channel operation, but maybe someone knows of something that would work. BTW, they operate on VHF.

Thanks!

 

[Grog]

That's likely the best way to do it. Hopefully he won't keep it on his belt on calls, not sure he'd want an EMS call to come out as he sneaks up on someone on foot :lol:

 

[chrismol1]

Hopefully he won't keep it on his belt on calls, not sure he'd want an EMS call to come out as he sneaks up on someone on foot :lol:

yeh, i was just going to say
well, if he really wishes that he could have one then there are a few options
But first, please tell what frequency he will need, becasue if there is one on the freq. he needs then it will be very easy.
yeh, he could go for the Motorola Minitor line of pagers, and set them up on "Monitor F1" in an ope position. you can go for the minitor 2 for around $30, program it is $30 from a good radio shop if you dont already have one. if you decide to go with a minitor 3 or 4 that can be programmed by computer then the price for a 3 or 4 from ebay is around $120-$140, if he wants a motorola minitor 5, then there around $200-$350 off ebay, but recenetly the new Minitor 5 (V) has been a bit lower in price from what I see on ebay recently. these are used prices by the way for the minitor 5. it depends how much he wants to spend, and how old he will want the pager pager to be
The Minitor 2 is from around the 80's and early 90's, the minitor 3 came in the 90's followed by the minitor 4 in the early 2000's then the minitor 5 in 2006.
alternatives can be a keynote pager by motorola, also a pageboy, but you'll probably never find one to easy. and then theres checkmate pagers by a few other companies, but not as readily avaliable on ebay as the minitor series and as nice as the Minitor series, I would go with the Minitor series
let me know how its going, i love the minitor pagers and helping people get them all setup and what to choose

 

[fineshot1]

yeh, i was just going to say
well, if he really wishes that he could have one then there are a few options
But first, please tell what frequency he will need, becasue if there is one on the freq. he needs then it will be very easy.
yeh, he could go for the Motorola Minitor line of pagers, and set them up on "Monitor F1" in an ope position. you can go for the minitor 2 for around $30, program it is $30 from a good radio shop if you dont already have one. if you decide to go with a minitor 3 or 4 that can be programmed by computer then the price for a 3 or 4 from ebay is around $120-$140, if he wants a motorola minitor 5, then there around $200-$350 off ebay, but recenetly the new Minitor 5 (V) has been a bit lower in price from what I see on ebay recently. these are used prices by the way for the minitor 5. it depends how much he wants to spend, and how old he will want the pager pager to be
The Minitor 2 is from around the 80's and early 90's, the minitor 3 came in the 90's followed by the minitor 4 in the early 2000's then the minitor 5 in 2006.
alternatives can be a keynote pager by motorola, also a pageboy, but you'll probably never find one to easy. and then theres checkmate pagers by a few other companies, but not as readily avaliable on ebay as the minitor series and as nice as the Minitor series, I would go with the Minitor series
let me know how its going, i love the minitor pagers and helping people get them all setup and what to choose

A minitor II pager is not programmable. You must re-crystal and also re-reed it for it to work correctly for the frequency and tones for your particular area. NO radio shop is going to do that for $30 as the price of a new crystal will probably cost about that not to mention the correct reeds(if they can be found) and labor. I doubt he wants to listen to ALL of the paging traffic ALL the time. His most cost effective method would be to find a used minitor III or IV pager for the correct frequency range needed and have it programmed but even this will probably not be sufficient for reception for a variety of reasons especially if he is far from the ems paging/ops freq transmitter. Either that or a used cheap programmable scanner that has the QCII decoding capability.

 

[chrismol1]

A minitor II pager is not programmable. You must re-crystal and also re-reed it for it to work correctly for the frequency and tones for your particular area. NO radio shop is going to do that for $30 as the price of a new crystal will probably cost about that not to mention the correct reeds(if they can be found) and labor. I doubt he wants to listen to ALL of the paging traffic ALL the time. His most cost effective method would be to find a used minitor III or IV pager for the correct frequency range needed and have it programmed but even this will probably not be sufficient for reception for a variety of reasons especially if he is far from the ems paging/ops freq transmitter. Either that or a used cheap programmable scanner that has the QCII decoding capability.

well, program I mean re-crystal, thanks for pointing that out, it might confuse some people
It will be around $13 for the crystal, and $15 for the labor, but many shops charge over $50/hour for re-crystal and install tone reeds, but thats just for labor, the parts are extra. if you know what your looking for you can save a lot of money by finding the parts yourself then sending them along with your pager to be serviced. the shops have the equipment to fine tune the minitor 2. but if you shop around online, there are shops that have a website who you can send the pager to be serviced for re-crystal and a permacode tone reed filter. If you know what Hz you need for the tone filter, then check ebay and many stores are selling the filters for about $10-$20, thats if they have the one in stock that you need. On ebay there is a shop that you can send your Minitor pagers to, for $50.00 they will re-crystal the Minitor 2 or computer program the, III, IV, V. But parts are extra, if you find the parts online, then its much cheaper than having the shop charge you an outrageous rate for them.
So the most cost effective way would be going with either a Minitor III, or Minitor IV, check ebay for them when you know what frequency you need. They come in VHF low-band, VHF high, and UHF
VHF lowband splits are tricky! there sub-band splits for the low-band
the VHF high band is from 151-159Mhz, the UHF is from 453-461MHz. there are services on ebay which you can send the pager to get it programmed. i've seen them on ebay around $15 including shipping. but check your local FD/EMS, they might have a minitor pager programmer that you could use.

 

[kyparamedic]

Thanks for all the replies. They don't use 2-tone for paging, just a generic warble, so he would have to leave it open all the time to hear anything anyway. I will relay all the info to him. Sounds like a used Minitor is the way to go.

 

[car2back]

If he wants something a little cheaper than a minitor, he might go look at the non-type accepted Chinese VHF radios for sell on sleezE-Bay. I bought an Abell (Kenwood knock off) for less than a hundred bucks that was field programmable and used it for several years as my throw-away portable on the fire dept. I'm sure people on here are going to whine about me suggesting that, but they do work!