WaveShark

Wherever pagers are used

POCSAG paging

Pager messages in clear at 512, 1200 and 2400 bit/s, deduplicated because a paging network sends every page twice.

Paging is still how hospitals, fire services and site alarms reach people, and POCSAG carries the message as plain text with a capcode naming the pager it is for. A network usually repeats each page, so WaveShark folds the same words heard twice inside two minutes into one message with a count rather than showing you both.

A pager channel is a pager channel wherever it sits, so the decoder is placed by shape rather than by band: point the receiver at the allocation your local network uses and it runs.

Worth saying plainly: this traffic often carries medical and personal detail, and what you may lawfully receive and keep differs by country.

What comes out

  • Capcode and function bits
  • Message text, or the numeric message
  • Baud rate and the channel it arrived on
  • A repeat count where the network sent the page more than once
$ waveshark --tune 153.35 --mode nfm --messages

Read next

FLEX pagingTwo-tone pagingMDC-1200

Something did not decode?

Record the burst with --record and open an issue with the capture. A capture that decodes becomes a test fixture.

Open an issue