[aprssig] Doubling APRS messaging in ham radio overnight

[Scott Miller]

Now THIS is something I find a little more interesting.  And I have the 
hardware to work on it, too - my service monitor does POCSAG, though all 
I've ever done with it is send test messages to an ancient, deactivated 
SAR pager from my junk box.

It's also something that I could see having some commercial value, which 
is always nice when it comes to justifying R&D costs.

What's out there for two-way pagers?  I've never had a chance to mess 
with them.  They're not nearly as widespread and cheap as the regular 
kind, but there have to be a bunch out there still.

Scott
N1VG

Ben Jackson wrote:
> On 1/24/2009, "Robert Bruninga" <bruninga at usna.edu> wrote:
> 
>>What we really need is someone to take on the simple task of a
>>PIC converter to convert APRS messages to DTMF PAGING text
>>messages so that those dozens of THOUSANDS of existing amateur
>>radio DTMF paging HT's can be used to receive and send APRS
>>messages.
> 
> Bob, while the number of FT-51s and TH-78s might outnumber THD7s, I think
> the question that needs to be asked is are the owners interested in such
> a service? Instead of focusing on older HTs that people may or may not
> have. Has anyone ever looked at a APRS -> POCSAG[1] Gateway?
> 
> Older, working pagers are a dime a dozen on the used market and there are
> some people who have refitted them to work on Amateur bands[2]. With the
> fact that there (quite literally) buckets full of working pagers at
> HamFests, why not have a "messagegate" that takes APRS messages to
> stations and translates them to a message destined for a POCSAG
> compatible pager. There were certain KAM TNCs that could encode POCSAG
> natively
> 
> Comments? Laughter? Rotten tomatoes? :)
> 
> ~Ben
> 
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POCSAG
> [2] http://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/projects/pager/plan.html
> 
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