POCSAG Pager Recommendations

[kainixon2187]

Does anyone have any recommendations for a VHF Hand-programmable pocsag pager? I'm looking to monitor multiple cap codes (I'm not sure if that's possible.) Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Citywide173]

What do you mean by "Hand-programmable?" I dealt almost exclusively with pagers for a couple of years in the 90s and never saw anything that could be changed on the fly. Also, are you looking to monitor the commercial paging frequencies in the VHF band or a proprietary system? There are restrictions on monitoring the commercial frequencies if you're not a customer.

My recommendation would be to just get a pager, programming cradle and the software from: Alpha Pagers | Unication USA

 

[kainixon2187]

What do you mean by "Hand-programmable?" I dealt almost exclusively with pagers for a couple of years in the 90s and never saw anything that could be changed on the fly. Also, are you looking to monitor the commercial paging frequencies in the VHF band or a proprietary system? There are restrictions on monitoring the commercial frequencies if you're not a customer.

My recommendation would be to just get a pager, programming cradle and the software from: Alpha Pagers | Unication USA

I'm looking to program an alphanumeric paging frequency for a fire department. Each rig has its own cap code so I'm looking for a way I can monitor a few different ones at the same time. I've seen pagers that can you can program and change frequencies without software and a cradle.

 

[kainixon2187]

It being hand programmable doesn't matter as much the important thing is that it can be programmed for multiple cap codes.

 

[Citywide173]

It being hand programmable doesn't matter as much the important thing is that it can be programmed for multiple cap codes.

The unication would do it, as I said, I haven't really kept up on the technology but a quick search shows this: Programmable Alphanumeric Pager Alpha Beeper POCSAG Pager Receiver GP2009N | eBay which can take up to 8 Capcodes

 

[cpg178]

Looks like the unication ones can do up to 16 cap codes you would be in good shape with one of those. I have their G5 p25 pager so I cant speak for the alpha pagers but unication also produces the minitor pagers for M so they are a good company.

 

[Citywide173]

Looks like the unication ones can do up to 16 cap codes you would be in good shape with one of those. I have their G5 p25 pager so I cant speak for the alpha pagers but unication also produces the minitor pagers for M so they are a good company.

I can speak for the POCSAG pagers, my department had a proprietary paging system up until a few years ago. They worked well, and were just as rugged as the Advisor Elite that we had before Motorola ceased production. Visually, they are identical and as an end user, you couldn't tell them apart.

 

[w2lie]

I'm a Unication dealer. The Alpha Legend Secure pagers are POCSAG and as others have stated, will alert for 16 cap codes. You can file each one into it's own mailbox if you prefer to keep the pages organized, or drop them all into a single standard box. Many many many years ago, I was a field tech for PageNet and these are the same pagers that Motorola had.

If you wanted to go this route, I do have a programmer and can save you from having to invest in one, unless you felt you needed it in order to keep up with programming.

Unication just retired the E3 pager, and that was a keypad programable POCSAG pager. The only problem was every time you entered the programming, the pager would erase the existing programming, so you had to start over. It was best to program it once and forget about doing it after.

If your voice activation is on the same band as your POCSAG paging, a Swissphone s.Quad could be a nice option. That has the ability to do both voice and POCSAG from a single device. I can get you info on those if you wanted as well.

 

[footage]

For FLEX the Apollo 924 works well and is (mostly) programmable without a computer.

 

[JSsignal16]

I have a Unication E3 VHF and it's a great pager. It can store up to 64 cap codes and is hand programmable, but only for one of the 64 slots. The rest have to be programmed through the software with a programmer. You can also hand program a frequency too.

 

[chief21]

If you don't require portability, the department I worked for used a PC application and a receiver to monitor, display, and log the POCSAG pages sent to the units. perhaps something similar is still available.

 

[kainixon2187]

Thank you everyone for the replies!

 

[Firebuff880]

Might check here -- Brad Dye's Paging Information Resource

 

[YalekW]

POCSAG is weird (and so is FLEX).

Also Brad Dye's info resource is odd with their descriptions.

The actual address sequence for a POCSAG address has only 7 digits listed only as numbers up to 2097151 addresses (also know as that 2^21 -1. Otherwise you start back at 0.) There is a very neat tool called "SoRFMON POCSAG Encoder" thatll give you the details. It encodes actual POCSAG messages to the soundcard and you can type in custom addresses, messages, numeric, alphanumeric. And its done all on the fly on the PC. But due to realtime encoding you might need to use an actual hardware device for this.

 

[CanesFan95]

There's a brand called Apollo Pagers that are hand-programmable.

 

[cfsimmont]

I read somewhere you can use a SDR dongle and an additional program to monitor the paging frequencies and decode the data. I wasn't able to get it working as I think my laptop is too old and slow to handle the workload.

 

[YalekW]

^^Ive been doing that forever CFS. That monitoring and decoding has existed since the dawn of SDR age.