K7HIO.NET

We settled on some used Motorola synthesized POCSAG VHF display pagers. Contact Ken - N7QQU to purchase a pager and get it programed. The price to K7HIO staff is approximately $60.  They are well-built and survive a lot of abuse and run for months on a single AA battery.  They are synthesized units, which means we can plug any frequency in that we want, as well as up to four individual or group capcodes.  With a programming cradle and the software, we were able to program the capcodes and frequencies into the pagers without too much trouble.

On the transmit side, we are using a Kantronics KPC-9612+ which supports POCSAG paging.  It's important to select pagers that are POCSAG and not Flex or something else.  The TNC allows paging an individual capcode or setting up a paging directory which correlates names and callsigns to the capcodes.  The TNC also has a remote paging server which allows a packet client to connect in remotely and initiate pages.

We initially started off using a Kenwood V7A radio in 9600 baud mode for the transmitter.  We used this because it was immediately available and we had a cable handy on the day we wanted to do some testing.  Later, we tried a couple of recent ICOM radios (An IC-2820 and an ID-800) and neither of them worked at all.  We could hear the paging signal on a nearby radio and it sounded identical to what we were hearing from the Kenwood, but the pagers wouldn't respond at all.  Since the V7A is used for other things in the station, we finally settled on a Kenwood TM-251 radio.  It's VHF with a 9600 baud packet jack and it works well.

We have a relatively long coax run from the radio to the antenna, so the 50 watts we were putting out was probably 25 or less by the time it got to the antenna.  We added a Virage VHF 200+ watt amplifier to the mix, driving it on "mid" power from the Kenwood.  This definitely helped our range.

Most of our members are within a couple of miles of the station.  With a Comet GP-3 dual-band antenna on the second story of the fire station, we seem to have very good success paging people within our "service area" (about 10 miles radus).