Who still uses VHF commercial paging?

[mancow]

This blowtorch 158.1 vhf pager is STILL on the air here after 25 years or more. Seriously who carries a vhf pocsag/flex pager? Will this thing ever die? Could they have forgotten about it and it's just sitting there simulcasting 900 MHz messages to nobody?

It is starting to get into the PD repeater.
Does anyone else have to put up with this ridiculousness?

 

[a417]

unfortunately, Mancow, i'm a slave to a 158.xxx POCSAG monster myself (albeit nowhere near you)

 

[mancow]

No kidding? What type of work do you do if you don't mind me asking?

 

[kruser]

Almost all the hospitals here are using VHF paging on both the 152 and 157/158 MHZ bands. A large amount of hospital staff carry VHF pagers.

To make matters worse for me, I live between four of many of the larger area hospitals and EACH hospital simulcasts the same signals from their high rooftops!
These buildings are located within maybe a 2 or 3 mile radius of one another and you can see all of them from the rooftop of any of them.
Why they need so many high power transmitters is silly. I've been told they put the antennas up on top and run high power to brute force the signals down into the basement areas where most ER's are located. The antenna radiation angles normally don't go down.
I would think it would be better if they chose one tall building and place the main transmitter there for wide area coverage and then use low power leaky coax type systems in the lower floors of the other hospitals buildings.
The same is true if you go to other areas of the county or city that has other tall hospitals. I don't experience issues from those paging signals as they are a few miles away but they still simulcast the same signals.

I also know many users that are not medical related users of the systems so paging is still very much alive. I carry a FLEX pager myself but it is on 931.xxxx MHz and does not cause problems for the other radio users around here.
Our state recently installed a VHF P25 system. With my luck, they made agreements with the owner of the 152 and 157/158 paging band market here in St. Louis and are using the unused frequencies within those bands for some of the new statewide sites.

I cannot use any of the GRE made digital scanners for the new Moswin P25 statewide system as the paging signals wipe out the poor front ends in the GREs or RadioShack equivalents.
I must use PAR notch filters on the two paging bands as it is in order to make the GRE's useable for other VHF reception but I can't use those filters for the new statewide system as they also kill the states choice of frequencies in this area. The state system uses output channels that are only a 100 kHz or so from the high power paging signals in the 152 MHz paging band. The inputs for the state sites are in the 157/158 MHz paging band so I can't even monitor the inputs. The PAR filters wipe out the P25 signals from the states towers near here.
Travel just a few miles away from the hospitals and you can use GRE made radios again as the signal levels from all the paging sites drops off enough so they no longer overload the front ends of the GREs. I really wish GRE would have put more design effort into the front end design of their digital models. Even the head GRE guy admits they are poor compared to the Uniden models.

I can use any of the Uniden models with pretty good success as they have much better filtering in the front ends to prevent overload or desense from the nearby paging signals.

I vote to move all paging up into the 929 to 932 MHz range and get it away from the majority of public safety and business users!
The ISM stuff around 920 MHz seems to get along fine with the 930 MHz paging sites.

Some of the Moswin users here do have issues when they must go to one of the area hospitals so their radio's are not immune to desense from the paging transmitters either.

 

[n7lxi]

Still using a VHF POCSAG pager here in Delaware to provide redundancy in paging notification to the UHF Minitor pagers and the State Wide P25 system.

... Oh, we get text alerts on our phone, too.

For such a flat state, we have several coverage holes where nothing but the POCSAG will alert.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk. Sorry for any spelling errors.

 

[a417]

No kidding? What type of work do you do if you don't mind me asking?

ambulance driver.

 

[mm]

Wow vhf hi band paging, how advanced. Here in NW Oregon we still have FD pagers on 46.XXX MHz low band, but actually they cover out to 100 miles, even indoors the coverage is adequate on low band. But really those 15x.xx pages are a pita so I can sympathize with you.

 

[lep]

Who uses VHF commercial paging? My hospital ER.

 

[kayn1n32008]

Telus still has VHF 149.770MHZ paging networks in both BC and AB. It a pain because the amatuer radio community could really use the 210-A/C2 antennas that they are attached to! It is all POCSAG Alpha paging. In Edmonton, there are a couple of multi KW ERP VHF paging transmitters in the city core as well but not Telus though. VHF paging is still alive and well in western Canada


Sent from an unknown place...

 

[Thayne]

This blowtorch 158.1 vhf pager is STILL on the air here after 25 years or more. Seriously who carries a vhf pocsag/flex pager? Will this thing ever die? Could they have forgotten about it and it's just sitting there simulcasting 900 MHz messages to nobody?

It is starting to get into the PD repeater.
Does anyone else have to put up with this ridiculousness?

I do, 152.72; I like it because it works almost all over the state and admittedly it is mostly used to monitor alarm panels for various sites, and one old guy that pages me when he wants to meet for lunch.

The other reasons are I am an old dinosaur that never texts and my phone is 3 years old and can text & take pictures but that is about it.

 

[RayAir]

A local hospital in Commerce Township , MI does for room paging and alerts from patients. I haven't listen in a year or so but I believe it was 150.800MHz.

I miss listening to all the voice paging in the 152MHz range back in the mid 90's.

 

[dixie729]

Daviess County, KY.
155.985
Recently went to a repeater 151.4525
Motorola pagers and tone system.

Sent from my HTC One X+ using Tapatalk 2

 

[SCPD]

Gota MINITOR V glued to my belt & Pillow. But looking to replace it with the smartphone (Page to phone) program.

 

[foxtail]

Still going on here too in Canada. I know 900mhz. for sure...need to check 140-150 range.

 

[kayn1n32008]

Still going on here too in Canada. I know 900mhz. for sure...need to check 140-150 range.

Check 149.7700Mhz.

In western Canada Telus has, in BC and Alberta, an extensive paging system.


Sent from an unknown place...

 

[Darth_vader]

152.005's a hot POCSAG channel in Portland. Legacy Emmanuel hospital uses it primarily for patient alerts.

As far as I know, it's the only VHF paging channel still in use around these parts. Everything else has gone to FLEX on 929-932. Even a couple of the other major hospitals down there have their own dedicated FLEX channels on 900. Commercial VHF paging is dead and buried.

 

[quarterwave]

I took my company's 250W 158.100 off the air last fall. It was on burning power, but the Zetron 640 had been damaged for 3 years and it had not been used by anyone but on-call techs for a couple years up until then. No one knew anything about the physical equipment at our tower site. That's what happens when people retire, and no one takes note of everything that they REALLY do.

I just punched up 158.700...I'm in a rural area, and it used to never drop carrier, even at night, but it is not up alot now. Just heard about 2 pages while typing this. It used to be part of a large network, all 1/4 K transmitters...but has few subscribers now. The company that has it mostly keeps it on air for the local hospital. It's not on our site, but a buddy told me it is basically a 50W mobile and a power supply now. There is still some 929 and 454 here too, although can't see it being anything more than a "just leave it, because that's cheaper than taking it down" type of deal. Commercial paging is dead, has been.

On the other hand, a buddy of mine is an IT guy for the hospital and they have been struggling with multiple software solutions for paging to Crackberries and Smartphones for 2-3 years now and none of it works right. They have had to keep pagers all along. What they don't understand is that using phones doesn't help someone who lives just 10 minutes form the hospital, but has little to no cell coverage. Yet, the pagers would work 50 miles out. Now they page (data) to the phone and then call the cell and the house of the person who is on-call. Doesn't seem like a solution. They spent all that money on phones and software, but would not even buy (a few) employees either a Cell BDA or a WiFi router if they didn't have one, to get at least data coverage at their house. Hello, a WiFI AP is like $30.

I told them to consider buying our paging setup, or the one from the company they rent the pagers from and leave it at the tower site, update it, and have their own. Nope....rather play with phone based stuff that doesn't work.

 

[mkewman]

There's a guy who makes filters for folks getting pounded by 152 mhz paging stations... I can't remember the name but if you google it, he makes each one and tunes it by hand. He'll even make custom ones for you.

There's one across the street from my work, I can hear it on almost every frequency on every band on my scanners, and Ham gear, my motorolas don't hear it though. I think it's 1 KW power. We have cavity filters on everything at work to prevent problems with it.