PagerMon: A browser based app for displaying pager messages from multimon-ng

Thank you to Dave for submitting information about his new pager message display software called PagerMon. PagerMon is a web browser based tool for displaying POCSAG pager messages decoded by multimon-ng. It is based around nodejs and uses a sqlite database for storing the messages. Multimon-ng is an RTL-SDR compatible digital mode decoder which can decode multiple protocols including POCSAG pagers.

PagerMon and the features and future features are listed below:

PagerMon is an API driven client/server framework for parsing and displaying pager messages from multimon-ng.

It is built around POCSAG messages, but should easily support other message types as required.

The UI is built around a Node/Express/Angular/Bootstrap stack, while the client scripts are Node scripts that receive piped input.

Features

  • Capcode aliasing with colors and FontAwesome icons
  • API driven extensible architecture
  • Single user, multiple API keys
  • SQLite database backing
  • Configurable via UI
  • Pagination and searching
  • Filtering by capcode or agency
  • Duplicate message filtering
  • Keyword highlighting
  • WebSockets support – messages are delivered to clients in near realtime
  • Pretty HTML5
  • May or may not contain cute puppies

Planned Features

  • Multi-user support
  • Other database support (MongoDB and DynamoDB planned)
  • Horizontal scaling
  • Enhanced message filtering
  • Bootstrap 4 + Angular 2 support
  • Enhanced alias control
  • Graphing
  • Push notifications
  • Non-sucky documentation

The GitHub readme has a getting started section which shows how to set up the server and get it running on your local machine.

PagerMon displaying POCSAG messages
PagerMon displaying POCSAG messages
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Brett

after multimon-ng pipe the output to nodejs reader.js

Alex

Any chance of a Dummies Guide to this..? I tried following the GitHub readme and failed at the “nvm” section with lots of errors. Completely broke my ADS-B system trying this one with adding nginx too (PiAware web server stopped working), and now re-imaging from a back-up. Just couldn’t get any install parts to work.

Dave

I’d recommend running the server on a separate box. I run mine on an Amazon EC2 instance (the free tier covers what you need). The client should run wherever you’ve got the SDR, but the server component can be run anywhere.

Unfortunately I haven’t had much time to get to that part of the future features pertaining to documentation that doesn’t suck 🙂

Gary Greer

Hi Dave, I’d like to use this to see CFA pager messages. I’ve got the multimon part working to the console – how do you store the pages in the database?
Thanks

Jordan

I would also like to know how to store the pages in the database. I have it running and can login to it. I set multimon-ng to dump to messages.db this is probably wrong. How exactly do I get the messages into the database?

Leonhard

You simply pipe them into node ./reader.js with e.g.
~/pagermon/server $ rtl_fm -f xxx -whateveroptions - | multimon_ng -t raw -a POCSAG1200 -f alpha /dev/stdin | node reader.js