Alpha Pager Decoder

[yardbirdjr]

Hello All!

I was just wanting to know if they made a device that would decode alpha pages, and if so where can I obtain one?

All I want to do is decode Fire, Ems & Rescue group cap codes and all call codes. I do not want and could careless about individual and personal cap codes.

Any help would greatly be appreciated

Thanks

David

[k2hz]

You won't find anything openly available in the US since intercepting pager messages is prohibited by the ECPA law. I don't know what is available now but there had been some overseas sources of software to decode Golay and POCSAG. It requies a discriminator tap output from the radio to the PC soundcard.

[Wowbagger]

Hello All!

I was just wanting to know if they made a device that would decode alpha pages, and if so where can I obtain one?

All I want to do is decode Fire, Ems & Rescue group cap codes and all call codes. I do not want and could careless about individual and personal cap codes.

Any help would greatly be appreciated

Thanks

David

If you can find an old COM-120B on the market, with the paging option, it will decode POCSAG. It won't do Golay or Flex.

[tvsjr]

If you can find an old COM-120B on the market, with the paging option, it will decode POCSAG. It won't do Golay or Flex.

And a $2M Ferrari will get you from point A to point B... so will a bicycle. I suspect the OP has a bicycle budget.

There are software packages out there (POCFLEX, PDW, others). However, be very careful that you don't fall fowl on ECPA. Governmental communications are exempted last I checked... however, if you're decoding a commercial carrier with such software, you're decoding everything. Bad juju. You could also look at using a pager with a serial "printer" output (like the old Advisor) which you would have programmed by the paging admin (because you are an authorized user, yes?), and grab the data off the serial line using a simple custom application (I'm assuming you want to capture this stuff and forward to email/SMS/etc.)

If you decode the whole channel, or decode data you're not explicitly authorized to decode, you should consider whether or not you really want to discuss doing so on an open forum. You might also want to read the ECPA.