It really upsets me that the VHF pager networks were shut down.
VHF pagers were the last way you could recieve notifications without having to offer up your location to surveillance. All satellite pagers require transmit-before-receive, and of course LTE requires that plus actively cooperating with the towers' triangulation of the receiver.
VHF POCSAG over large urban areas is something we never should have let go of.
In Sweden the "minicall" network (POCSAG, ≈ 169 Mhz) is still active and in use by some niche industries.
I know of it being used for fairly mundane things like Grafana Alerts (or the equivalent), but in circumstances where you need to reach people in areas where cellphones are forbidden or lack coverage (like security sensitive data centers for example).
Snooping on that frequency band in ≈Stockholm it also seems to be quite actively used for sending machine-to-machine commands in some industries, perhaps not always that stringently authenticated...
Which I guess is a downside though, you need to take proper precautions in the "application layer" since the network is completely open.
Plus, VHF signals can get where no LTE or satellite can arrive, even if you are two floors underground. Downside is that anybody can read POCSAG, especially nowadays with inexpensive SDR receivers...
There are a bunch of POCSAG paging products that support their own flavors of encryption. Unication has a few that support AES encrypted messaging. You keyload it at the same time as the rest of the pager setup.
I'm not a ham, because I don't want to hang out with self-appointed cops, so I got a new Chinese pager made up with a center frequency of 433.5MHz (ISM, unlicensed), then configured it to work with a Pi-Star rig radiating well under the EU/Irish legal power limit, and receive messages infrequently enough not to run afoul of duty cycle limits. Because I know there's some ham who's just salivating to track me down and quote the rule book to me, and I want to deny him (it's always a him) that pleasure. It reaches all the way to the far end of my farm!
You can get traditional alphanumeric belt loop pagers or snazzy modern wristwatch pages these days. Check AliExpress.
The tedious sort of people who like to make it their mission in life to quote the rulebook as often as possible, frequently incorrectly, in an effort to assert their authority and dominance. I want nothing to do with them.
Yes!! This. I would totally carry a pager if the network still existed. Not all the time, but just sometimes when I'd like to feel free.
Ps there is still the iridium paging service which is one way and is not transmit before receive. But they want to get rid of it and stopped selling hardware. It's really hard to find now second hand.
No, iridium is definitely transmit-before-receive.
The only thing you can receive without transmitting is a one-bit "message waiting" indicator, so you don't waste uplink bandwidth polling the satellite unless there's something there for you. Basically the satellite broadcasts a list of terminals that have messages waiting for them. I recall there being some kind of bloom filter, so technically it's less than one bit.
You can't get anything else downstream unless you transmit first to ask for it. Also the only way to clear the "message waiting" bit is by transmitting to the satellite, so you can't even try to encode a message by flipping that bit on and off.
No, the original Iridium paging service really is (was?) one way.
You had to manually update your paging location by dialing some number or by using a web interface when moving significantly, or link an Iridium phone to your pager, which would then automatically update the paging area (MDA) every time you made a call.
What you mean is probably Iridium SBD, but that’s a different, bidirectional service (also used for pager-like devices these days).
Yes, Iridium SBD requires transmitting before you can receive.
I did not know about Global Data Burst; I think that's what you're referring to. Holy cow it's expensive though, although I guess it has to be since you're using a lot more bandwidth*footprint. Like $6.00 per message per delivery area expensive. And they're kinda vague on how big a "delivery area" is.
No, I’m referring to the Iridium pager, which is just its own service and has been around longer than SBD, I believe. Messages were (are?) free to send on top of a monthly flat subscription rate per pager.
GDB is just a branding for their own flavor of what they're selling which is Iridium Burst, which also appear to run on the 9602/9603 SBD modules, so... maybe Iridium Burst is just spicier Iridium SBD?
SBD is bidirectional unicast (and mandatorily so; as you say, SBD can't transmit to devices before they initiate a mailbox exchange, with the exception of a "message waiting" indicator.
Iridium Burst seems to be multicast-capable, and optionally bidirectional or unidirectional, so "spicier SBD" makes sense!
I was carrying a pager as late as 2009 because a customer's data center was two stories underground in one of the older tower blocks in downtown Toronto.
I had one and I've only been outside the coverage area once, when I went on cave trip. I noticed my pager said OUTRANGE which was something I had never seen any other time. The coverage really was phenomenal due to the low frequency (159Mhz).
Usually pagers were used to ask people to call back so I don't think that is a big issue. It is like shooting at someone you recognize far away in the street so he can look back and meet you. Everybody will hear that but not the actual content of the conversation afterwards.
Yes, there are many reasonable arguments. For example: your data is sold to third parties you don't know, and they use it against you or in unethical ways.
For example, visiting a mental health clinic might mean your car insurance rates go up, or Facebook adjusts their algorithm to cause you more distress and hook you more, or your credit rating goes down. Objectively, you are worse off because you were tracked.
See a recent example with BetterHelp, where they sold their patients' history of mental health medications, suicide attempts, depression, and a few other things that were on an ingestion form to social media companies. After promising on the very form where they collected this data that they wouldn't do it. That is the reality of the situation. You turn into a product when you're tracked.
Neither of those links demonstrate mishandling of location data collected via cell phone. They’re just regular misuse of data that would be possible even if nobody involved was carrying a phone.
Well, I'm sure you understand that there is a broader theme here, given how central it has been to public discourse and lawmaking in the last several years.
But those VHF pagers transmitted all the rest of your data in the clear unprotected, it just didn't have your location or any knowledge if you received the message.
Well, you are right. But the message as well as the medium can be privacy-respecting. Even with encrypted messages, a lot can be extracted from metadata that is a part of the medium.
These days pager tech has advanced to support public-private key encryption for messages. So the messages being in plain text is less of a concern.
I'm sure you're right. They'll keep our boring, unimportant location data safe. Just like they do with our financial data, or account info, and other such important information.
Nothing bad ever happens when people's info is leaked like that anyway right?
BTW I need to confirm some data I bought - what are your CVVs and SSN again? It's fine to post it publically here, nothing bad happens and it's already been leaked 100s of times at this point.
Israel used phone location data to target and kill Palestinians, with a sub-90% accuracy rate, supposedly. Probably not a big concern right now in America, but it could always turn into one. So I think it'd be good if this wasn't a possibility. Better safe than sorry.
And when it’s an abortion clinic you went to in a neighboring state because it’s illegal where you live? How about when it shows you did something that could get you prosecuted in your home country?
Surely you're not saying you're fine with your location data leading to wrongful imprisonment, which is what sometimes happens if companies hoard this data?
VHF pagers were the last way you could recieve notifications without having to offer up your location to surveillance. All satellite pagers require transmit-before-receive, and of course LTE requires that plus actively cooperating with the towers' triangulation of the receiver.
VHF POCSAG over large urban areas is something we never should have let go of.