In recent events, I learned that some pagers only have receivers. How are discrete messages sent to these devices? How is it authenticated? How do they know the device got the message?

  • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    At my old house I picked up pager traffic on a software defined radio and decoded it. Everything I’ve ever seen has been unencrypted.

    Basically the pulses come from the towers the first X number of pulses are the address kind of like the phone number for the pager. All pagers listen to all pulses and just ignore the ones that aren’t addressed to them.

    Here’s some details on one of the more popular protocols

    https://www.raveon.com/pdfiles/AN142(POCSAG).pdf