Tagged: pagers

Forwarding Pager Messages Received with an RTL-SDR to Email

Over on YouTube Jack Riley has created a video that documents his system which uses an RTL-SDR to receive POCSAG pager messages and forward messages sent to specific pager addresses to an email address. He uses his RTL-SDR on a Raspberry Pi, together with rtl_fm and multimon-ng to receive and decode the pager messages.

Then using a custom program that is available on his website he filters messages for a particular 'capcode' which indicates the address of a particular pager. When a pager message to the specified capcode address is received, the program turns the message into an email which is instantly sent out.

This is a nice way to forward pager messages on to a more modern device such as a smart phone.

Creating a Pager using a Raspberry Pi and RTL-SDR to send alerts via Email.

Chaos Communications Congress Talks – Iridium Pager Hacking

A few days ago the Chaos Communications Congress (a technology and hacking focused conference) commenced. Among the talks there was one about reverse engineering the Iridium satellite paging system using software defined radio. Iridium satellites provide global communications via special satellite phones, pagers and other transceivers.

In the talk the speaker shows how they used a USRP radio together with a cheap active iridium antenna, a bandpass filter and an LNA to receive the Iridium satellite signals. They also mention that an E4000 RTL-SDR together with an LNA and appropriate home made antenna for frequencies in the ~1.6 GHz region can also be sufficient. Once they were able to receive signals they were then able to reverse engineer the signal and create several pieces of software to decode the pager messages. The code is available on their GitHub at https://github.com/muccc/iridium-toolkit.

Sec, schneider: Iridium Pager Hacking

Pranking Colleagues with the USRP B210 Software Defined Radio

The Ettus USRP B210 is an advanced $1,100 software defined radio that is capable of both transmit and receive. Balint, one of the researchers at Ettus, has posted a video showing how he was able to play a light hearted prank on some of his colleagues using the B210.

Earlier in the year we posted about how Oona Raisanen was able to use her RTL-SDR to receive and decode restaurant pagers (the wireless devices given out at some restaurants to notify you when your food is ready).

Balint used his USRP210 controlled by a mobile phone app to transmit a fake signal to his colleague’s pager, causing it to activate before his food was ready.

You Can Page Me Anytime - USRP B210 + GNU Radio (teaser)

Decoding Pagers on the Raspberry Pi with RTL-SDR

Hackaday has brought to attention a tutorial written on the Raspberry Pi forums by Sonny_Jim showing how to decode pager transmissions on the Raspberry Pi. In the tutorial he also shows how to set up a web server to be able to view the decoded transmissions in a web browser.

He uses a RTL-SDR and Raspberry Pi and pipes the output of rtl_fm into the multimonNG software to decode the messages.