What is a pager?
Pagers are one of the simplest telecommunication devices in use today. Used primarily for short messages, the pager is often utilized by a number of professionals in various disciplines. Prior to the widespread use of cell phones, personal pagers tended to be the main technology used to make quick one way and two way communications when a phone call to a land line was not possible. Even with the popularity of cell phones today, many businesses still consider the pager to be a viable form of communication. The concept of paging was first introduced in the 1950’s. At the time, the main function for pagers was to reach healthcare personnel in the event of an emergency. The basic premise for the portable pagers was built on the use of internal paging systems that were common in hospitals of the day. Use of the portable device made it possible to reach a doctor when he or she was outside the facility and could not be contacted with the use of a telephone. From this simple beginning, the pag
A pager is a small radio receiver (and sometimes transmitter) that can receive and if also a transmitter, send messages. • What types of messages? The earliest units, usually called beepers, simply gave a tone alert to indicate that the wearer should call a pre-determined number for a message. These have been replaced by newer technologies and are usually seen only in in-house applications like restaurant reservations paging systems. Next came units displaying numbers, usually up to 12 digits per The most common use is to indicate the number of the caller, but it has become common to encode messages in the numbers. Because some of these systems use sideband signals from broadcast FM stations these have the widest coverage and are still favored by users who must have the greatest accessibility. Newer units display alpha-numeric characters and support text messages with lengths in excess of 80 characters allowing meaningful messages to be sent to the wearer. Some of the newer pagers and
