Voice pager tones back in the day

[bassman21]

Back in the 80s and 90s here in Houston I used to pick up a lot of pagers on both my scanner and television. I realized one day that the wiggly lines on my black and white TV were from a POCSAG pager tower close to our house.

Well in addition to the data pages, I also received voice pages. Usually it would be a mix of POCSAG and voice pages. Some of the voice pages would start with the standard two long tones we commonly hear on fire and EMS, but others would be a long tone followed by several short tones (beeeeeep blep blep blep plep). Anyone know what this was called? What is 5/6 tone paging? Was is from Motorola? Are there any videos or wav/mp3 of them? Not the two tones there are 1000s of those.

Thanks

 

[ramal121]

Could be 5/6 tone. That's a european standard. The long preamble tone was a "wake up" to the pager in battery save mode. Find it here:

Digital Modes Samples

 

[bassman21]

The 5/6 tone is the closes one I found. The ones I used to hear were much faster though and I seem to remember more than two short burst after the first long tone. It would go something like this.

beeeeeep blip blip blip blip "doctor johns please call the operator, doctor johns please call the operator" (brief data burst at the end)

Golay or POCSAG paging sounds.

"beeeeeep blip blip blip"this is yo baby's mamma, I better get my child support check or I'm gonna beat yo ^%^$%&%^%&"(brief data burst at the end)

Again sometimes it would be the two tone we hear on fire and ems.

Thanks for the link

Edit: Maybe that paging company repeated them to reduce the likelihood of errors? Like they do with EAS alerts.

 

[nd5y]

There are several multi tone paging formats.
Download the chart from Tone Signaling Charts - Free: Midian Electronics

 

[mikegilbert]

5/6-tone paging, would be my guess.

In my hometown, there was a combination voice and alphanumeric paging service.

Every 30 seconds or so, the transmitter would send out an eleven tone sequence. Voice pages would start with a tone remote keyup sequence, followed by the 5/6-tone signalling, then voice.

Listen @ 1:17 to this video. You can hear the tone come through after the CWID.

The paging was coming through as it was programmed into my scanner and forgot to lock it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32pZDstGwUg