Towering Technology of Paging

You call someone’s pager and it beeps. Simple.

But getting the call to the pager is a technological achievement of towering proportions--literally.

Suppose you need to reach your spouse somewhere within the area covered by your local paging service. You dial your spouse’s pager, a local telephone number.

The call is answered by the paging service company’s computer. You punch in your phone number and hang up. The computer relays the information to a radio transmitter, which sends it to a local radio tower, which broadcasts it on the sliver of radio wave band reserved for your spouse’s pager. The pager beeps and displays your phone number.

For regional and nationwide paging, the signal is sent into outer space to be bounced off a satellite and broadcast throughout the service area.

Alphanumeric paging--words and numbers--requires human intervention. The caller either types the message into a computer attached to a phone line or speaks with an operator who does the typing.

It can take as little as 15 seconds to transmit a phone number. Alphanumeric messages take longer, but not usually more than three minutes.