POCSAG project presented to the public at RATS technics day

The POCSAG project has now been officially published and demonstrated to the public for the first time, at the RATS technics day held few weeks back (sorry, I am a lazy blogger :)

Initial interrest to the project was surprisingly strong, which I personally am really happy about. That could mean also there are lots of potential contributors to the project, either assisting building the network or providing sites for the transmitters. Hessu OH7LZB had done good work to present the infrastructure he designed for the POCSAG project, and there was the proto TX site feeding messages from APRS network and DX cluster via this infrastructure.

That is Hessu OH7LZB himself at the board where we presented the project. To show off a little, we brought also the Tecnomen Hi-Q POCSAG transmitter, which we have a suitable pile storaged away, acquired when the commercial national paging network Kaukohaku was decomissioned.

The Hi-Q can push out 200W power on 144 MHz, which should give quite good coverage and therefore no need for too many transmitters forexample to the capital area.

Project moves onward slowly, currently we are looking for a pager model to fulfill the needs for the "customers" for this network. Fortunately the world is not yet completely pagerless, and we found  suitable pager dealers from the USA. I ordered a test batch of pagers from a dealer saying that they can provide the predicted amount of pagers this network is going to need when in full run someday. More about the new pagers when they arrive!

Network infrastructure prototype for POCSAG network ready for testing!

Hessu OH7LZB was busy over the weekend and the result was the first working revision of the server and client software components to drive the POCSAG network. There are also integrations to DX-cluster network to feed dx-spots to the pagers and APRS-IS integration for APRS messaging.

Hessu has an article of the setup in his blog.

OH7LZB contributes to the POCSAG project

Great news everyone! Hessu OH7LZB, the author of APRS.fi, joins the POCSAG project by developing and producing the first version of the client-server infrastructure for the paging network, so we have something working to show at the RATS meeting next weekend. As I write this, Hessu's system is feeding the test transmitter DX-spots in quite constant stream..

Great job Hessu, thank you very much for your contribution!

OH8HQL contributes to the POCSAG project

Jarkko OH8HQL from OH8TA radio club has contributed this SMD version of the AVR POCSAG encoder, very fine job indeed! We are looking into the options of making a small batch of these in some cheap PCB factory.


Click the image to inspect it full-size!


Great job Jarkko!

First POCSAG pages sent and received OK!

The test setup for POCSAG paging on 144.975 MHz is working and the first messages have been sent and received successfully! This Proof Of Concept-setup will be on display in few weeks at the RATS technics-meeting held in Espoo. We will try to automate something to be sent to the few test pagers we have.

Next thing to do is to design the infrastructure for the paging network and investigate how to use the real paging transmitters left behind from the commercial network in this system. We can, of course, use the transmitters as just transmitters and create the modulation using the AVR POCSAG encoder, but it would be interresting to be able to use the internal modulator and POCSAG encoder of the transmitters. I'll keep this issue posted too.




The YouTube video above shows the first tests with the encoder and few test pagers, and my image gallery has some more pictures of the project

So what if paging is so last decade. This is fun!