Who is still using pagers?

[Tim-B]

It seems I can't drive within a mile or so of a certain tower site without hearing a sudden and very obnoxious
BEEEE-DOOOOOO . . . burrrrrrp intermodulating with one or more frequencies I am scanning that are anywhere within a few megahertz of that pager frequency. And of course it has to be quadruple the volume of everything else I hear on the scanner. It is not a fire dept or other public safety pager. Those are on other frequencies that don't transmit with a tenth of the power of this obnoxious thing. It goes off about every minute or so. So in this day and age of cellular phones who is still using that many pagers that I still hear about a page a minute when I am near that tower? Any ideas?

 

[footage]

Hospitals, health workers, some people in IT support.

 

[900mhz]

I am sure those paging companies are pushing the daylights out of the PA's...probably beyond rated limits, in addition to pushing bandwidth beyond FCC limits for deviation.

 

[w2lie]

Since I own East Coast Pagers, I'll chime in on this one and share who still buys the old Flex and POCSAG pagers from me.

As stated above, a lot comes from medical staff. Nursing homes also use pagers. Fire Departments in rural areas rely on POCSAG paging and even maintain their own paging frequencies.

Some people use old school paging for the First Alert service and use their pager's email address to receive those messages instead of sending them to their phones.

I also get several calls a week from people who are looking for pagers because they are tired of always being connected with their cell phones. They want the ability to disconnect in a way and only be reachable to a small number of people.

Ham Radio users are building their own Pager Networks that operate on amateur radio frequencies.

IT professionals are buying them to get alpha texts on critical and major tickets.

Alarm companies and even maintenance crews use pagers to get their next dispatch jobs.

Trust me, paging isn't what it was decades ago. I was a technician for PageNET / Arch and left that part of the business 20 years ago when the writing was on the wall that cell phones would be replacing paging. We would have several national frequencies, several regional, and one or two local frequencies. Messages would be queued up for several minutes. That is no longer the case. Many transmitters now cycle through the frequencies instead of having dedicated transmitters per frequency.

In the end, it's mostly medical.

Paging certainly isn't where it was, but it also certainly isn't dead.

 

[wtp]

the frequency would be nice to know.
down here FPL uses 153.605 (i believe) to contrrol AC units and water heaters, to avoid brown/blackouts.

 

[doctordialtone]

Paging certainly isn't where it was, but it also certainly isn't dead.

I used to wear 2.

One was a voice pager that repeated the 8 second voice message twice when it alerted. It was on 158.7 Mhz

The other was on UHF (454.0 I think). It was merely a tone-only pager. It made a tone sound when alerting, at the same frequency as the French Fry machine at McDonald's.

I got a tour of the voice pager company. The messages were actually recorded onto a giant 1/4 inch tape loop that circulated around a room then was written over. The company was Message Center in Hartford.

Those were the days.....

 

[Dog]

If you have an SDR you can see if you can find out by decoding them.

POCSAG PAGER DECODING

Edited to add.
That is an old link I had bookmarked. There may be better software or techniques available now.

 

[Tim-B]

They are in the VHF-Hi business band. Those transmissions have been blowing my hair back for decades. Come to think of it I don't get much pager intermod in other cities and I do a lot of business travelling. Must be like what is in post #3 above. Probably not confining their signal to the proper bandwidth and using too much deviation. The tower that the antenna is on is a tall one too. About 600 feet. Must be doctors with pagers like other posters have said above. There are several large hospitals in this town.

 

[mmckenna]

They are in the VHF-Hi business band. Those transmissions have been blowing my hair back for decades. Come to think of it I don't get much pager intermod in other cities and I do a lot of business travelling. Must be like what is in post #3 above. Probably not confining their signal to the proper bandwidth and using too much deviation. The tower that the antenna is on is a tall one too. About 600 feet. Must be doctors with pagers like other posters have said above. There are several large hospitals in this town.

Several of the common paging frequencies were exempt from narrow banding, so they are still running 25KHz, which will really sound strong on a scanner that's set up for narrow band.
And they usually ran gobs of power, 300 watts or more.

I shut my old voice paging system down in 2000 at work (157.740MHz), most people either had a cell phone or a two way radio at that point. No one was disappointed. But I do miss my pager. Was so much easier to ignore than a cell phone call from our dispatchers, finding a pay phone could be a pain in the rear, though.

 

[popnokick]

Come to think of it I don't get much pager intermod in other cities and I do a lot of business travelling.

Since you didn't write what scanner(s) you are using, I was going to suggest trying a different one. I've found a great deal of differences in various scanner and ham radio VHF receivers when it comes to receiving unwanted pager intemod transmissions. However, if you are using the same scanner when traveling to other cities that have lots of strong paging, perhaps that is not the problem. Have you tried with any other scanners when at home, and do they receive as much intermod as the one you're writing about?

 

[Tim-B]

It has happened with several different scanners but only within a mile or so of the tower. At home I have no problems.

 

[FFPM571]

My old Firehouse was across the street from a large Hospital that is a Level 1 trauma center. They had a VHF pager system that always overloaded the front end of our Motorola Matratrac radio in one of our engines. We always had to put ourselves enroute or in quarters a block away from the station. We had our techs come out and check the rig radio. The answer was it's not you it's them....

 

[BC_Scan]

While its not what it used to be here in the west the hospitals and search and rescue use them, you sure dont see people carry them any more, but numerous freqs in canada still 900 mhz and others ,
as well as Fire .