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Anyone know SD Fire Pager frequency

Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 10:46 pm
by SkipSanders
Realized I've not seen it anywhere, yet on some research, it's supposed to be a city-run 4 site VHF system. Or at least was, 3-4 years ago.

Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2007 1:21 am
by mike
It could be 154.310 or 154.145.

Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 10:10 pm
by Mikey
154.0850?

Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 5:01 am
by SkipSanders
154.085 was it, thanks.

NOW I remember to check an old sourcebook I had from the 90's that had REALLY complete info, and sure enough, it was there.

Seems to be a 'non-standard' paging format, though. More investigating to keep me busy. Must compile it all! :roll:

Seems to be Golay. Were I to be going to try to actually decode it, I'd have to get an interface, since the only decoder software for that that Motorola hasn't smushed into the dust yet (though they've come close!) is Winflex, which doesn't work sound card only.

Not, of course, that I'd actually try. :wink:

Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 8:12 am
by Mikey
Another interesting one is 155.9400.

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 4:37 am
by SkipSanders
Bah. Kind of annoying that Moto smushed all the golay software, since it's actually perfectly legal to decode the fire department's pagers, as they're not on a common carrier. The ECPA only banned monitoring pagers on common carriers, when you read the thing.

Oh, well, it's all moving, anyway, it seems. The chatter seems to be that County is working with the city to build a brand new Countywide Master Paging system, to be finished in a few more months.

Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 5:17 pm
by SkipSanders
Small update, as the years pass, and it's become completely impossible to find even used replacement pagers using the obsolete GOLAY encoding (despite that the firefighters like it as very reliable), a few POCSAG pagers are beginning to appear on 154.085 along with the reputed 5,000 GOLAY pagers already there.

So far, looks like just testing pages, but sooner or later, they're going to have to replace out those old, falling apart pagers, and Motorola neither makes them, nor allows anyone ELSE to make them, as it's a proprietary Motorola standard. Supposedly the infrastructure of paging transmitters and terminals are already capable of handling POCSAG just fine.

Oh, and while it also seemed to be GOLAY, paging has been heard on the old TAC 1 channel of 155.685 as well, so there may be other VHF high band paging channels in use.

If you wish to monitor these, or the county paging system on 155.940, you'll need a discriminator tapped scanner on the appropriate frequency, and I'd recommend finding the program 'POC32' on the web, as it's worked best at sound card based decoding of POCSAG for me by a long shot over all others. PDW213 would be the second choice.