Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!killer!netsys!vector!nobody
From: fabscal!dorn@gatech.edu
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: re: Nationwide Paging
Message-ID: 
Date: 21 Nov 88 21:00:37 GMT
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X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 8, issue 185, message 5

>>Just reading the newspaper here and came across another one of those ads
>>for a NATION-WIDE paging service. [...] Surely the target receiver is not
>>paged all across the country...
>   Some companies do.
Most companies do.  I have used a couple of different nationwide paging
services.  The best working one was Cue system, which distributes the paging
data stream by satellite to a large number of cities.  In each of the cities,
the paging data stream is modulated on to a subcarrier of a large FM radio
station.  My pager would scan the FM band for a radio station with the
specific recognizable subcarrier and monitor the stream of data, listenening
for its number and page data.  If it couldn't find one, it would say so on
the display, so I would know I was out of range.

>
>>Does the person initiating the page need to know what city the receiver
>> is in ?
>   If paged in one city, yes. In return, you pay less for the page.
No, absolutely not.  You dialed an 800 number, entered the ID number of the
pager, and then entered the number you wanted displayed on the pager. All
pages go all places, but the data rate is good enough to handle it, plus
it buffers them up.  Sometimes, during busy parts of the day, a page could
wait in the queue for 15 or 20 minutes before going out.


>>What happens when the receiver is on board an airplane, high in the sky?
>   You lose. I think.

Well, that depends,...  I received quite a few pages while on cross country
flights.  The scanning action of the pager tends to lock on some FM station
it can find, and when it loses that one, it scans for another.  There are
dead spots, but it works pretty well.  Also, one of the technical folks for
the paging company told me that they actually send each page a couple of times
on 10 to 15 minute intervals, but that the pager can recognize a duplicate by
some undisplayed serial number, so it only beeps on the first hit of a given
page.  This way, a momentary dead spot doesn't wipe you out.


Alan Dorn Hetzel, Jr.
gatech.edu!fabscal!dorn