When I started driving at age 15 in 1996, my first mobile device for my parents to keep tabs on me was a transparent green Motorola beeper. It had a tiny screen on the top edge just big enough to show me the number that was beeping me. My mom would just send 303 for "mom", the 3s being like sideways Ms. I knew to call our landline at home if I got 303 on my beeper. Then, I'd have to hope I still had some quarters left in the center console of my car and find a payphone. My parents would give me a roll of quarters to keep in my car so I'd have no excuse to not call them back. When they first gave me the pager, I wore it tucked inside my jeans pocket with the clip sticking out on the outside. A teacher noticed it and called me to the dean because they thought I was dealing drugs or something. They didn't believe that my parents gave it to me. They confiscated it until they could talk to my mom. This video brought back so many memories I hadn't thought about in decades.

The beeper pager is still widely used in restaurants, i recently go to massive food court where you can buy from different vendor, and most of them using beeper to call people that their food is ready, it's neat to see the simplest operation still used for 70 years.

I adore seeing old tech working again, those eureka moments when you get it working again is just ❤

Thanks for the shout out! And for the always great videos on retro tech.

Those 80s pagers is iconic, everywhere in the whole world have the same memories about pagers. It is an evolution of communicators, see how we from simple one-way pagers to the modern mobile phone. Also best thing to pagers today is you able to send messages easy, very fun.

When I worked at UCLA Medical Center, I was impressed that pagers were still being used, and that I could go on an intraweb site, select a doctor's name by drop-down, and type in a page from my desk.

I worked for a defense contractor up until about a year ago. I used to have to admin our pagers. They're very good for reliability in 2024.

Last year, I got a bunch of old pagers working using a Raspberry Pi W Zero and RPITX. Definitely have a look at that. I’ve also started playing with Meshtastic too 👍🏻

The FCC ID number should lead you to the FCC "OET" database, which should give you a lot of relevant information, and often a user manual.

The New South Wales Government are in the process of building a brand new paging network for the emergency services for the RFS, SES, Fire and other gov departments.. the network is designed to stay up during natural disasters. There are also a few networks in the US (eg Spok)… hospitals and some councils in Australia still run paging networks, you can find hundreds of them if you search the correct frequency ranges on the ACMA database.

Never forget getting one in late 90's was only like 5 bucks a month and was like come on mom you will always no where i will be and such. Was great time to be alive she would page me then i would 1-800-collect tell her where i was or where to pick me up and when and hang up lol. dam i miss the 90's

Ahhhh pagers... the meshtastics of the 80s

I used to re-crystal pagers in high school as side job. We'd take trade-ins, I'd re-crystal and retune and off it went to the rental fleet. If memory serves, golay encoding yields a 6 digit cap code and pocsag is 7 digits....

I clicked one link, and now KZfaq is convinced that I want to see all pagers and beepers content there is. I'm not complaining, this is awesome

Your order is ready, please return to the service counter. 😁

Pager still work nowadays They are still use because they are simple and can be reliable for long distance communication and use a separate network from cell phones and sms So pagers can still work when your phone has no signal Mainly nowadays emergency and on call services mainly use em along with a cell phone

As a bit of a POCSAG nerd myself I still carry a late 90s Motorola that still works ! Thankfully there’s still a few services that support major city’s in the US

I’ll never forget when the Motorola flex pagers came out. My boy and I were the only two people in the hood with em. We stood next ti each other and I sent him a text. 5 minutes later he got it. Technology has come a long way!

I designed pagers for Philips in the late 1980s. It was a great experience, gave me the tools for designing low power IoT devices 40 years later :)

Love how back then the selling point was the privacy of beepers.. Now they have convinced most to not worry about people knowing everything about you..

The pagers I know from the 90s had sim cards and when someone called it showed the number. Some could receive SMS too.

My Grandpa had a pager back in the day and I do remember in the early Y2Ks that cell phone kiosks in the Mall had pagers. They interested me slightly but I ofc was already used to seeing people with PDAs and cellular phones. Pagers were just a bit before my time but it was cool to see the march of technology in real time. The other way I knew about pagers was the Palm VII, VIIx and the i705. These Palm models had a built in pager and you could sign up with Palm and access the web! It sounded pretty wild. It used the Mobitex Pager network. Idk how it worked but it did. So normal Palm applications are in .prc format, these web enabled applets were .pqa and were stuff like email, stocks & weather.

I actually would love it if we would go back to using pagers. I think we've become way too insistent on immediate responses and communication from all people who have a method of contacting us. There are a lot of things I love about having a portable supercomputer in my pocket, but I don't think we actually have the mental architecture required to be in constant contact with people who aren't physically present and be healthy while we do it. The idea of getting a page and then being able to check that when you can reach a landline just sounds so nice and calm to me.

Back when I was a teen, beepers were all the rage. In the mid to late 90’s, few people had mobile phones and a teen couldn’t really afford one. These were a reasonable way to at least reach someone if you needed them. They even made beepers targeted to the teen demographic here in the Netherlands. I never carried one myself as I got a phone pretty early.

This was an excellent video, here in italy pagers were called "teledrin", from the word "tele", abbreviation of "telefono", (telephone), and "drin" because of the sound that they made. Everyone remembers that SIP, whitch was the only operator for pagers and phones here in italy, used frequencies that were very close to the ones used by our national television service back then, this caused that in lots of areas that were close to repeters while someone was reciving a pager message and someone else was watching television the television audio would be cut off and you would have been a able to hear the transmission audio instead.

i love your videos so much, can't wait to see you play with meshtastic with us

Pagers are still used in the UK for hospitals, fire service (in some areas), status reports from some systems, vetinary surgeons and some other services. Usuall found around 150 MHz and some UHF frequencies. I used to watch messages using old software called pdw and a radio scanner, but you can use an SDR too with a virtual audio cable.

Absolutely glorious video. Incredible cohesion, concise juxtapositioning, superb payoff. 10/10

Love that vibrate setting. Back when you could feel it.

I had the Pageboy ll back in the early 80's...the caller was able to leave a short voice message, but honestly the audio was often so garbled I ended up calling in anyway...to my surprise I learned that they are still in use today by many fire brigades, due to the excellent coverage..Thanks so much for sharing!

bring the whole 80s back!

I still use a pager every day to respond to emergency incidents with the fire department. We use the POCSAG with the LX4 & LX7. Its a great system because it’s very reliable and the reception is really good!

Not 30 years! I was a courier up until sometime in 2000 and we received jobs on a pager with basic monochrome display. IIRC it was a Motorola.

This brings back memories. In 1982-1983 I was working on the design for the PG32 POCSAG decoder chip. 2800 gates in standard cell. Design toolchain was slow. Manual netlist entry and many hours looking at printouts on green/white paper. Happy days.

That first Motorola you were playing with looks old enough that it might not be pocsag. Golay was the signaling format that was precursor to Pocsag and a lot of early tone only pagers were Golay. Also, changing the frequency on most non synthesized pagers requires not just changing the crystal, but retuning the IF stage, which often means replacing some laser trimmed capacitors with adjustable ones.

Great stuff - nice work! I worked in a pager message call centre in the 90s - absolute nightmare! We had a target of at least 600 calls a day, each one lasting seconds ... the occasional call lasting up to a minute while you explained what a pager is and took some abuse for it. This brings it all back! 😉

I had exposure to these through my dad who had beepers and pagers. He worked on call for the E&WS. Naturally they were all Motorola models.

Used to love watching tomorrow's world. Some things they got spot on, some things wildly wrong 😂 Thanks mate, love the effort and care that goes into crafting these videos 😊

What a blast from the past. I had a Motorola alphanumeric pager. I think back then I spent 9.99 a month or maybe 19.99 I just don't remember. Thank you for bringing me back. You got my subscription.

It's not always as simple as just swapping the crystal, a lot of the support circuitry will likely be assuming the crystal is what it is

Brings back memories... in '94, one of my responsibilities was a telephony application I wrote that would page people with overdue bills... and they could call back in and get their balance from our OS/2 DB/2 server or get a small reprieve from being shut off. I had a basket full of various pagers on my desk, and every morning and afternoon, I would make sure they beeped and booped on schedule. We had dozens of programing tools for every flavor of pager... most of them where unreasonably finicky. We would open up pagers and unsolder/swap components... and had a device similar to your HackRF... except that it was the size of a large desktop PC. We had kinda ghetto franchises in 20 cities... and probably had most of the drug dealers and prostitutes from the area in our database, so we CONSTANTLY had the police stopping by with subpoenas. Fun times, LOL!

I remember wanting a beeper as a kid because they always looked so cool in the movies.

Great, now I have a ridiculously strong urge to own a functional pager for no reason. Thanks for another great video, you never disappoint!

@14:55 pager doing like an electric football game had me laughing 😂 I used to run a pager-based school zone flasher system. The server would dial a phone number to page the flashers on or off. Typically it did this twice - once just ahead of schedule and once at about the scheduled time to turn it on and at the scheduled time and slightly after to turn it off. Since there was no acknowledgement it was do it twice with fingers crossed. 🙃

In the Netherlands, we still use Pagers for the whole country for the emergency services called P2000. they use capcodes for the stations.

Your videos are always so wonderful to watch. I remember my friend in the 80s would be doing similar things you showed but with his scanner and some mod he did to the scanner back in the 80s. Sad things are getting banned here in Canada. Just because auto makers are too lazy to make cars more secure and harder to steal. Ends up punishing people who just want to be curious about electronics and learn new things. Grateful people are still creating the tech you used to help you do what you showed in this video.

Ah dude, this brings me back. Somewhere in a box in the attic, are a couple of the beepers I had when I was in middle & high school. My whole family had them in the mid '90's, because the cell service at the time was extremely expensive and a handheld mobile wouldn't even last on standby for a whole day. At my first job after high school, I worked in an office supply store and sold the first texting and two-way pagers. Skytel I think, and I probably have one of the very 90's business-centric sales brochures somewhere. We also sold PalmPilots, and I remember someone sold a kit that allowed you to get pages from your Palm device on them.

I loved my pager. I had a Swatch watch pager that got me through university.

I loved my Motorola LX4. Brilliant device.

All your page are belong to us. Lol. Great video. I had all of these in the 80s/90s. The two-way Motorola pager was awesome. Texting in the 90's!

I am so glad I have stumbled upon this channel, it is rare these days to see someone as passionate about technology and its' history.

I work in telecoms, there is still lots of paging transmission equipment in service!

I had a few back in the day one for every member of my family members

Your writing and editing skills have improved so much since I started following your channel. No doubt you'd make excellent documentaries about everything and anything that comes to you. Keep up the great work!

Fascinating

Thank you very much for bringing these retro hardware videos

In Germany, we still have a nationwide paging network on 466 MHz called e*Cityruf, and it's VERY active. Most of the activity is telemetry data and status messages from stuff likes pumps, servers, etc. Great video btw. Always nice seeing old tech brought back to life. I'm actually currently trying to build a POCSAG transmitter and simple pager that uses the 433 MHz ISM band, just for the fun of it^^

My first job I had an alphanumeric pager. There was a email to pager gateway our provider had, so I created scripts that would page me the results of day long compiles so I'd know if I was out for lunch or something that my job failed and I needed to get back early. Fun stuff!

Another great upload from Janus! I've always been interested in pagers.

we should have more of this sorta retro tech... turn off all notifications, and use beepers to signal "I want you to do something"! and yes, as been said, some food places use stuff very much like this, it's great, because nowdays you can make 'em super cheap, AND they work well

Great video! I remember carrying the type with the LC display. Later I carried the type that could display whole sentences!

Very nice. Just what I was looking for a couple of weeks ago.

you know its gonna be a good one when you come home to a fresh Janus drop

glad you're so KEEN to tinker with these, was fun watching!

All I can picture in my head when I see these is the GTA original soundtrack playing in polyphonic while I'm speeding around in my red Banshee 😭

❤ Calm & relaxing voice. Always interesting tech being reviewed. It's one of my favorite channels 😍

Amazing! Literally amazing. I think there was a kids toy that had a screen and a RF modem, but I forgot its name, I know it was Russian (or from some Slavic country). You should have a look at it as well!

As far as I know there's no one else doing this kind of retro pager goodness on youtube so thank you!

Thank you for showing us the way! Cinematography was on point as usual 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

Your content is such quality Janus. I get excited every time you're in my feed.

Around 1993 I knew someone with an imported FM radio from Japan which uses different frequency bands than in the USA. It could tune in and listen to USA pager audio transmissions.

I used to program these in the back of my dad’s shop as a kid. The software and hardware wasn’t too bad to use, later on when he started selling cell phones we needed binders full of programming guides ha.

I intercept pager messages here in the UK on 158.350mhz using SDR software and a program called PDW. Some very interesting messages come in very frequently!

That first Motorola pager you showed is very similar in design and construction as their System Saber, and Astro Saber public safety radios that were available at the time. It actually looks to reuse the belt clip that was optional for the radio. The sabers have two set screws on the bottom, and when loosened the electronics slide out of the housing just like that pager. Seems like they were designed in conjunction, or the pager was the inspiration for the design of the Saber.

I must have had literally hundreds of these things over time...Also the big bricks by Motorola, with the small led single digit fisheyed red numerical display

When I worked at Big Name Hospital we still had pagers through 2016. Not sure if it was a campus-only private system or wide-area cellular.

As a late 50's IT guy this was infinitely relatable. At the end the pager era we had Motorola Skytel pagers, I still have mine but the weird proprietary battery has passed on. Awesome video, thank you!!!

An excellent video as always!

Thanks!

I've always wondered how these things worked. Seen them in different media before, looked on net to see but now, I might understand much more!

Well, this was a fun surprise. Your content keeps throwing me back to my youth, so happy to support, even a little. Thanks!

Very cool gadgets. I've never seen a pager in person, they weren't really a thing in my neck of the woods in their era, or at least as far as I can tell. It is interesting to see how they worked and how they were configured. Thanks for another great video!

Best retro tech youtuber!

Please, Janus. I have been needing this. 🙏

I have my apollo from my tame as an ambulance officer, it is programmable with many capcodes and freqs from the unit itself. id love a POCSAG encoder so i can setup a local area pager for my family. thanks for giving me the insight into the Hack RF. I decode it all the time here from a Uniden Bearcat with a Mod Tap and decode two freq at both 512 and 1200 baud, 2400 is rare here, also decode MDT from the ambulance, you get some really interesting stuff on the air!

Very interesting! This is so cool!

Me and a friend had pagers from a hotel that we got from some unique way and used them for a few months for free.

I've been wondering about this, I recently found my old Motorola pager. I may need to experiment.

I've been monitoring POCSAG traffic in Sweden for years. I modified two Motorola pagers to use as dedicated receivers. I also wrote my own POCSAG decoder for Linux. Sadly this past year I've noticed more and more encrypted pages (128-bit IDEA encryption from what I've been able to figure out). I guess the paging company is aiming to transition all pagers to encrypted varieties. Well, it was fun while it lasted.

👍🏻👍🏻

Amazing video as always. Reminds me I got a skyper in one of my boxes that I also never saw running... Oh well, if you once again inspire me to buy and build strange equipment, I'll be sure to enjoy the journey.

always a great day when janus cycle uploads!

❤❤❤ Here we go again

I’ve mostly known them as beepers 😂 they were still common in the earlier years of my life.

I remember in the late 90s before blackberry was a thing, my dad had a beeper with a small calculator-esk display that he would get sms messages and he would read them. If i called him and he wouldn't answer, instead of a voice machine i would be directed to an operator, I'd tell them the message to my dad, and they would beep him.

Great video!👍 I had a pager back in the early 90s when mobile phones were still too big and impractical to carry around. It could recognize a handful of numbers and receive short messages.

I don't understand anything about technology and I don't even know English very well, but your channel and video are very interesting and always bring me a lot of nostalgia and flashbacks, it should be emphasized that you choose such music that creates an atmosphere

This was a great video!

I’m the telecom guy for a county government in the US. I still have a couple of departments that use pagers.

Damn, posted 2 hours ago! Glad I found it. You earned yourself a subscribe, sir