Member-only story

You Can Still Use a Pager in 2023

How a Raspberry Pi will help you resurrect this classic communications device

Dmitrii Eliuseev
Debugger
12 min readMay 2, 2021

Pagers were popular many years ago, and some people may still have one at home. Is it possible to test the pager now? Absolutely, and I will show you how to do it.

Let’s get started.

POCSAG — The Messaging Protocol

In the 90s, I was a student and the pager for me was something like a Star Trek Communicator, a piece of cutting-edge technology. It is fun to remember it because now I know that technologically the paging protocol is very straightforward. From the encoding perspective, the pager is not so different from the wireless doorbells that are selling now for 5$ in Aliexpress.

Let’s say we want to send a message “TEST” to the number “1234”. The message in a binary form will be looking something like this:

10101010101010101010101010101010 - Preamble
01111100110100100001010111011000 - Frame Synchronization Code
01111010100010011100000110010111 - Idle codeword
00000000000100110101111000111111 - Address + Function Bits + CRC
10010101101000111001001111111100 - T E S (7 bit/symbol)
11001010100000000000001111100011 - T . .
01111010100010011100000110010111 - Idle codeword

Create an account to read the full story.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

Debugger
Debugger

Published in Debugger

Debugger is a former publication from Medium about consumer technology and gadgets. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Dmitrii Eliuseev
Dmitrii Eliuseev

Written by Dmitrii Eliuseev

Python/IoT developer and data engineer, data science and electronics enthusiast

Responses (7)

Write a response

Interesting application for anonymous communication. No sim cards.

Hello! Thanks for sharing. I got my Hans on a couple Motorola scriptors both of the m used, and in the same frequency. Both of them have a “PIN number” sticker of 7 digits which I would assume it’s the capcode. I followed your example and could not…