Swissphone Pagers?

[CVPI4Ever]

Cleaning out some stuff at the FD, I found 4 "Swissphone" brand pagers. I have never heard of them before in the fire service.

I have no idea what to do with these. I have listed them on our GovDeals twice for $30 for the lot and no bites. I have done some research on them, and it doesn't look like they were wildly popular here in the US. We are on an 800MHz system now so these would not work for us, and we don't issue pagers anymore since we have the ActiveAlert app.

What are these worth?
What can we do with them if they don't sell?

 

[phadobas]

What frequency do these operate on? And do you have some sort of programming cable for them?

 

[lenk911]

I have no idea what to do with these.

Racom (Racom.Net) is/was a dealer for them in Marshalltown, Iowa. There are a few Iowa counties that were sold UHF POCSAG systems I recall. Your right fire/EMS paging is has become passe. If they are POCSAGs, a lot of hospital systems still use these pagers, i.e. Mayo Clinic.
Good Luck.

 

[TampaTyron]

Oh man, I sold/worked on those in the 2006-2009 era.......... had to have a special jig and lots of software/firmware undocumented features.

Not being a pager nerd, it was a real learning curve.

TT

 

[CVPI4Ever]

What frequency do these operate on? And do you have some sort of programming cable for them?

They are VHF. No programming cable or anything else for them

 

[TampaTyron]

There was not a significant user/support base for them. There were certainly pockets of folks using them, but I never saw the widespread adoption of them, especially compared to a Minitor that you could just program and go vs "tuning" of the Swissphone. I think they got past the tuning and fw/sw bugs in later versions, but I had moved on at that point and no longer worked with them.

My gut reaction is that few people are runnning them professionally and the "fun" factor for hobbyists is "low". The pros already have their needs met and don't want to introduce used pagers and the non-pros have no idea what they are looking at.

TT

 

[Cameron314]

E-waste bin if you have one.