Pager Decoding/SPOK/Signal Strength/Map Change

[MrBungle]

Hey, so one of my things is pagers w/PDW and I dig intercepting that stuff. I've seen some wild things come across pagers. Historically, SPOK has been my go-to for decoding, as in my area (Brigham City) I always received.

Over the past few months, the signal has degraded a lot. I can physically see their broadcast tower in North Ogden/Pleasant View on the county line, to the east of 89 on the hill. Both frequencies turned to crap, national and local.

I checked their maps, and Brigham City is now totally eliminated from their mapping. I get a signal, but it's hella weak. My surrounding counties are still receiving strong.

http://cloud.spok.com/coverage/LocalOne-way/SLC.pdf

Anyone else decode in Utah? I'm now stuck on American Messaging for decodes, but I saw way more on SPOK.

 

[theaton]

What specific devices are you using to decode the pages?

 

[MrBungle]

Devices? I'm on a Panasonic Toughbook CF-53, RTL V4 dongles, RTL Wideband amps and antennas.

It's SPOK- their maps confirmed they throttled coverage in my specific area. Super lame. Weber and Cache have great coverage. Box Elder & Davis got shafted.

UPDATE: I just checked Wayback machine and I totally confirm- they killed coverage in Northern Utah.

Old Map:

Wayback Machine

New Map:

http://cloud.spok.com/coverage/LocalOne-way/SLC.pdf

Such a bummer man. SPOK was great. I'm gonna call them Monday and ask what gives...

 

[N7OLQ]

It has been a decade or so since I ran PDW. I'm not familiar with SPOK. Back then, I found that County Search and Rescue was dispatching and sending updates over POCSAG, so it was cool to supplement that with what I was hearing on the scanner. I filtered on those pagers. There was a lot of crazy stuff being sent, but there was too much boring stuff overall.

 

[MrBungle]

Lots of boring overall is very true and I've got some great filters set up to capture the best of the best. But with the SPOK signal doing down in my geographical area, and the surrounding areas unchanged for the most part, tells me they did a re-alignment and adjustment based on their customers.

Here's a super cool article someone wrote recently on the use of pagers.

America's Secret Pager Giant | HackerNoon

I'm finding American Messaging doesn't have as much cool and interesting things going on as the SPOK customers. I'm still getting full zoom.gov meeting URLS including passwords, just not as many of them through American Messaging. Less Google stuff too.