Your_old_pal_Hal
Member
Hospital systems are amazing. Think about it, the antenna's up on the roof and the E-plane of radiation goes out toward the horizon, not down into the bowels of the heavily shielded radiology, maintenance office, or into the areas where biomedical equipment generates heavy RF noise. They're not very efficient. But some have quarter kW transmitters on 152.0075 or 157.45 just to brute force into the building. A lot of the hospitals do contract with paging companies to co-locate their equipment, but there aren't many companies still doing it. I think RCC in Franklin County is about the last local still in paging. If you were further out from those big buildings, you'd be doing a lot better.I would not think that one way paging is going to die anytime soon.
It is still heavily used in the medical field for doctors and hospital staff.
They could use local systems for the hospital staff but the doctors still need the high power systems when away from the hospitals.
We have a LOT of doctors at work and every one of them still carries a one way pager.
I live near three major hospitals and they all seem to need a VHF and UHF (930) transmitters on their rooftops. The 900 signals do not mess with much here but the VHF signals tear the heck out of anything but a commercial grade receiver. I do agree that one way paging is dieing in the public sector but if you monitor the two common VHF frequencies, I'd bet they are still running a 75% duty cycle.
The signals in the 930 range run an even higher duty cycle.
I'd love to see they day that they die off though! I must use vhf PAR filters on the scanners for most of my VHF monitoring otherwise the paging signals get in and wreak havoc.
I also own Icom R7000 and R9000 receivers and those are mostly immune to the paging crud as I call it. Much better front ends there.
Have you tried EMR filters? I think they make a series that's pre-tuned to the old IMTS and paging range.