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!