Advisor Gold / Zetron 2200 and OTA programming

[jccarson]

At my site we are using a Zetron 2200 and OTA programming. Additional software sits on top of the Zetron for alarming and putting text pages through.

To better utilize our bandwidth I wish to start utilizing common/broadcast capcodes in the pagers. This creates some service problems which may be solved by the following.

1. Utilize Over The Air programming, I'm told that the Advisor Golds (at least) can do this, maybe not out Advisor's (old bricks). My paging vendor states that OTA for Advisor Golds has never worked, but I can't verify this due to a lack of documentation on what codes I should send through the pagining terminal to get this accomplished.

2. Rig the PPS (PF584 Motorola software) to a terminal at the site for user self service when service staff is unavailable. This requires screen scraping and sending keys to the DOS app ... and I've already figured out that redirecting standard in / out / err from the dos screen does no bit of good whatsoever.

So the questions I'm hoping to answer from this newly joing community are as follows:

Do any of you have experience good or bad or better yet documentation on OTA programming Advisor Golds? Or a source of such documentation, even for a fee?

Is there any Windows software available (not DOS box / command prompt) that can program these pagers?

Is the serial protocol to the programming boot available? Board Moderators and everyone else, this is not a request for a flaky reverse engineering site or anything that would be deemed inappropriate by site rules, please do not respond with anything that will get us all in trouble.

Do you know anyone that has written a program wrapper for automating the pager programming through the command prompt / DOS PPS utility or know enough about how the program operates to know how to at the least read the screen?

Barring all of this, are any of you running a Zetron 2200 terminal?
Can any of you running your own site systems recommend a reliable pager for the industrial environment that offers and fully documents its OTA programming interface?

Thank you, in advance for any help you can provide.

[The Pager Geek]

Well, I'll take a stab at it:

Advisor Gold can't be OTA'd (at least Motorola never wrote a program for it)
Advisors can be (motorola DID write a program for these)

(Apollo pagers are OTA-able and have the "quality" of the current Motorola stuff.
OTA is very easy for these.)

I don't know of any windows based software for the Golds. Apollo, Yes

The serial protocol is a proprietary 7200 Baud hardware flow controlled "thing." The pager talks to the software, not the other way around. (if you get what I mean by that. Yes, I know it's a two-way conversation, but the pager is the one with the brains here... unlike the two-way radio side.) The pager Firmware contains all the communication stuff, including password retries, etc.

A couple of questions of my own:
How many pagers?
What are you trying to achieve with the cap codes? Are you maximizing the function addresses of POCSAG?
Are you bound to the 2200?

tpg