My fire dept is venturing into the world of alphanumeric paging at this point, using the original Advisor pagers on a city-owned paging network. That part is fully up and operational, and working fine.
The issue is that our response area suffers from, shall we say, less than total coverage. The topography and such isn't important at this point.. there's a solution that WILL improve coverage - I'm curious about the one component we don't have to complete that solution.
My contacts within the city are receptive (excuse the pun) to us operating a 'rebroadcaster' at our station. We have good reception of the city's POCSAG signal at our station-located tower site, and transmitting from there would cover our area quite decently. (On the same frequency as the existing pager tower sites, I probably should mention.)
The folks at the city are tied up on other more important projects right now, and getting this alpha paging expanded is not a rush to either them or us. So to fill the time I thought I'd try to understand the rebroadcaster concept a little more in-depth.
Is there a commercial device I should be looking for, that'll receive the signal and then "play it back" a few seconds later from our xmitter? Is it simpler than that - just some "black box" to do the same thing?
One of my department's more tech-minded members brought the "K1RFD EchoStation" software to my attention - is that sufficient for our purposes?
Thanks in advance, of course
