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The forgotten war on beepers

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Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#381

Post by supertrope »

xattt wrote: post #142
ubermonkey wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were several years where having BOTH was desirable. Cell service was expensive, and battery life was short, so many folks carried a beeper that was always on, and a phone they turned on if they needed to make a call and had no land line option. I've never understood the "it's a leash" thing. Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them.

> Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them. You are right. However, a ringing phone in the mid-to-late 20th century created a ton of tension and was a movie trope. People felt obligated to respond to what they assumed was a human being on the other end. Obviously, this obligation to respond has been diluted with robodialers and mixed messaging methods.

Every communication channel fills with spam. Unless there's a direct disincentive like the cost of a Fedex overnight envelope, or strong moderation marketers/spammers will eventually comprise the majority of volume. Sometimes it's the "content" "creators" themselves who fill the channel with native advertising and clickbait.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#382

Post by supertrope »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #355
kanbara wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah yes, the beeper, more high power than the top end 5g UC flagship phones. because that makes so much sense

It actually makes a lot of sense. A lot of pagers operate on lower frequencies (~100 mhz instead of 400 or 700) that can penetrate way deeper than the higher frequencies used by modern phones. Plus the data rate is substantially lower, which acts in the favor of getting reception. So yeah it makes a ton of sense. These are very different devices operating using different frequencies and protocols.

Pagers are typically unidirectional. So a client's inability to transmit back an ACK deep inside a building is not a constraint. Just crank up the broadcast power on the network side.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#383

Post by cyberax »

gambiting wrote: post #359
cyberax wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So all these stories where someone is put in jail, spends months waiting for trial At least in West Coast states, you are almost guaranteed to get a low bail or no bail at all. You'll likely be denied bail only if you are accused of something heinous, so your sentence will be longer than the time in pre-trial. Or if you have a history of skipping bail. So your scenario is highly unlikely, at least on the West Coast…

>>At least in West Coast states, The stories I've read were mostly in New York where this kind of thing happens not infrequently, so I guess - I have no data to prove otherwise. >>My personal philosophy is that laws must be written in such a way, that they don't require any prosecutorial discretion or plea deals. Well, we 100% agree then. >> Instead, we have people who want to "fix the root causes of crime" or "aboli…

> The stories I've read were mostly in New York where this kind of thing happens not infrequently, so I guess - I have no data to prove otherwise.

I'm not too familiar with NY data sources, but it looks like they have reformed bail recently: https://www.fwd.us/news/new-york-bail-reform-success-story/

But even before that, they had a below-average ratio of pretrial/post-sentencing detention.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#384

Post by cdchn »

noodlesUK wrote: post #342
cdchn wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They’re a much more reliable way of getting an emergency call out than a multifunction mobile phone. More reliable than a landline?

Real landlines are a rarity these days, most stuff is VoIP. In any case, I was talking about getting an emergency call to the person wearing a pager (as in the case of doctors or other on call people), not the reliability of calling 911/999/112/whatever. Any mobile device is going to be more useful than a landline in that situation because the doctor could easily be out at the shops or having lunch. Pagers were inven…

This probably varies wildly but in the US (or parts there of) landlines have to work in emergency situations - ie no power. Even if you have a 'phone line' delivered over optical the phone company provides you with an optical network interface device with a battery backup. I keep a landline just for emergency scenarios (also 911 actually knowing where you go if you call them and can't relay your address). Can't get that with no account virtual VOIP services or even rely on the big mobile providers to give you that functionality.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#385

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

karma_pharmer wrote: post #111
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard about it years ago probably from WP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pager#Security It's very inefficient because every tower must broadcast every message. This is why you can find an archive of pages from the morning of September 11th online, they transmitted unencrypted to a huge area. So that raises costs and limits the coverage area. Fine for a hospital with 100 idk doctors who need paged, not fine for cont…

It's very inefficient because every tower must broadcast every message. No, it's incredibly efficient because the messages are tiny . If you need to send a long message, then you page the person with "you have a long message from XYZ, please use higher-bandwidth mechanisms to retrieve it".

So it only works if you have a secondary communication system that is TX/RX.

Within the scope of "How does no-TX work?" it's very inefficient, because the payload is small.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#386

Post by EasyMark »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #277
bruce511 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I resisted having a phone at all until 2013. People were amazed even then. I ended up getting one for development. It proved useful enough that I used it myself, but I've managed to limit usage to WhatsApp (and SMS), web reading (like HN now) and not much else. Lots of Web stuff (especially financial stuff) requires 2FA so SMS is now more-or-less required. People have learnt though that my phone is always on silent,…

Mines usually on silent too because certain individuals abuse it and I don't like hearing it ping and boop and beep every 30 seconds. None of this is urgent stuff.

My phone stays on silent, and I use it more like a pager and email program. I check it it 4 or 5 times a day, but it serves me and I don't serve it. I imagine if I had kids I'd be a bit different with it and not block anything from them, but otherwise, being able to get my attention a few times a day when I check it should be enough for anyone.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#387

Post by wkat4242 »

cubix wrote: post #245
wkat4242 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes!! This. I would totally carry a pager if the network still existed. Not all the time, but just sometimes when I'd like to feel free. Ps there is still the iridium paging service which is one way and is not transmit before receive. But they want to get rid of it and stopped selling hardware. It's really hard to find now second hand.

I was carrying a pager as late as 2009 because a customer's data center was two stories underground in one of the older tower blocks in downtown Toronto.

Yes it is amazing how good the coverage was.

I had one and I've only been outside the coverage area once, when I went on cave trip. I noticed my pager said OUTRANGE which was something I had never seen any other time. The coverage really was phenomenal due to the low frequency (159Mhz).

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#388

Post by wkat4242 »

wa2flq wrote: post #371
wkat4242 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they don't interfere because they only receive. They send nothing. At least the pagers of those days didn't, two way pagers did exist but they were super expensive and really uncommon. To be honest I wish I could still buy one because I'd love to be reachable but not trackable at times. Unfortunately Spain has no pager network in operation anymore. In regards to how they work, the messages were broadcast over the…

There were two way pagers (receive and send). The receive only ones rarely interfered with medical equipment. But occasionally the local oscillators on receive only pagers would interfere with medical or sensitive research equipment.

> But occasionally the local oscillators on receive only pagers would interfere with medical or sensitive research equipment.

Hmm yeah but then it was really really poorly designed equipment.

If they were that senstive that they'd even pick up a LO they'd be screwed by a police car mobile radio driving by, an FM station in the area etc.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#389

Post by lostlogin »

> New Jersey prohibited beepers for under-18s entirely, possession could result in a 6-month jail-term - a law proposed by ex-policeman and Senator Ronald L. Rice.

How the hell could a beeper be worse for a kid than 6 months jail time?

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#390

Post by kotaKat »

lxgr wrote: post #354
kotaKat wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDB is just a branding for their own flavor of what they're selling which is Iridium Burst, which also appear to run on the 9602/9603 SBD modules, so... maybe Iridium Burst is just spicier Iridium SBD? https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-burst/

SBD is bidirectional unicast (and mandatorily so; as you say, SBD can't transmit to devices before they initiate a mailbox exchange, with the exception of a "message waiting" indicator. Iridium Burst seems to be multicast-capable, and optionally bidirectional or unidirectional, so "spicier SBD" makes sense! But their paging service was definitely unidirectional and unicast. Here's an old talk on decoding the signal,…

Yep -- actually contributed an NAL Shout Nano so they had additional protocol decoding on top of SBD ;)
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