Snoop on Pager Data

22

 

On Fridays Adafruit has some hardware fun. This week the top of an old pager was cracked open. There is a radio receiver inside that is constantly listening to the frequency that the pager is on. It is demonstrated that there is serial data that can be seen leaving the radio receiver chip. On an upcoming hack the data will be fed into a computer and the stream of network pager transmissions will attempt to be displayed. There might be a few soccer moms out there who still use pagers? Or is it just drug dealers these days?

 

 

 

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22 Comments


  1. The pager network service ceased many years ago.


  2. dine, you are wrong. the pager network is still used a lot, just not by ‘civilians’


  3. There is a lot of police and fire departments that use it, plus other businesses, especially in the rural areas. It is still a lot more cheaper, than cell phones. Plus it has better reception, than cell phones in many areas.


  4. thats what i said wasn’t it?? the SERVICE ceased.


  5. no, the service is still available in all areas.


  6. get me a working pager and I’ll believe you.

    ps. in the uk


  8. As an employee of a business on the north coast of California, we have many towers, and sell pagers. No idea about UK pagers.


  9. hmm i see. interesting, get me one, page me, and i’ll believe you!


  10. I had a pager up until a few months ago… I work as a sysadmin for a certain 3 lettered company that was about to buy Sun last month. So, yes, they’re still useful when SMS is not reliable for notification.


  11. I used to be in a technical service field that provided 24hr support and we had a service that would take phone calls and page the message and phone number to us. That was not that long ago. Lots of the real estate people around here still use pagers as a first method of contact. I was joking when I said there are probably only a few soccer moms on the network. 🙂

    I remember when I was making the transition from pager to cell phone that the pager would work in areas that there was absolutely no cell phone coverage.


  12. if things go well, we might sell over over one thousand of them to a single company. So dead? Not on your life. Harder to get “full” California coverage due to some companies shutting down their towers.


  13. thats very interesting, now lets do a cell phone, I totally fogot about the freq. section


  14. Pagers still has it use. As sayed police, fire-dep. etc. Has use of these. One can ask why use pagers ? Well as sayed, pager-networks still are up and running in many places and those who own paging towers still wishes to make money out of them as longe as they can. So offering cheap paging-solutions to police, fire-dep. etc. others. You can still say WHY? … Well you can have all police, fire-dep. etc. ++ on Cellphones, but when you have so many on cellphones there are bound to be some miss use of cellphones. Police, fire-dep etc. filling the phone with sms, mms etc. ++ from girlfriends etc. and what not. So the I say … can YOU do that with a pager ? No!

    A pager is a Pager … it has one thing to do, and it does that very good. So for many as Police, fire-dep. etc. ++ that are only need to respond to a code ore call, this will do just fine.

    But yes, pagers will die one day, but most likely to free up space in the frequens band for something els. That has happend some place in EU, but not everywhere. Seems like EU are willing to free up more space in the already crowded frequens-band then the US are doing. I might be wrong about this, since I myself is from within the EU 😛



  17. did that in school 15yrs ago … unfortunatnly no more pager service in central europe … – its more fun to hack the uplink satelite link to distribute your own messages around 😉


  18. Interesting thought, if you can place a message on the network do you think there would be some master code that would allow the message to be displayed on all listening devices. Something like an emergency broadcast message.



  20. inspired by this I tried to hack a pager I bought, I described my findings here,

    http://codinglab.blogspot.com/2009/05/h … art-1.html

    I am trying to figure out what is the protocol of the signal I am receiving, any help?

    Thanks

    P.D: I hope is OK to post a link to my blog!


  22. I saw this demoed at a hacker conf some years back, when there were still active pager networks in the UK. They used a regular scanner, took the unfiltered output (to stop the voice-oriented amplifier from messing up the purity of the digital signal) and ran it through a simple decoder. We watched as in real time we saw ‘tonight’s admin password is xxxxx’ and similar things (as well as many more dull things) scroll up before us. The presenter told us of one of the most touching messages he saw, along the lines of ‘tests are back good news no more worry darling I dont have AIDS’.

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