[nataz]

I'm curious about the use of pagers in healthcare. I work in an industry that would love to have pagers for on call events, but service has proven unreliable (especially indoors) unless you build out your own dedicated wireless infrastructure for every building you are working in.

We have alternative secure voice/data communication, but they tend to either be bulky or have strict storage and carry restrictions.

Would love a small reliable pager system to carry on our person that would simply let us know to check in.

All of the pager architecture in the US seems to have disappeared in the marketplace.

[ac29]

Seems like it'd be a plausible (small) business idea. A $10 SDR stick with a piece of wire as an antenna is enough to pick up pager signals, and I doubt you'd need a much more advanced setup to transmit. A 100 or 400 MHz license in the US costs maybe $500 for a decade. Mounted at the right spot, you wouldnt need much power to cover a large area with a single transmitter, though basements are always going to be trouble.

[ornornor]

> A $10 SDR stick with a piece of wire as an antenna is enough

That doesn’t sound like mission-critical levels of reliability.

[ac29]

My point was the technology is cheap - there are certainly better dedicated, inexpensive chips that could be used to make a simple wireless messaging system.