Following from my other post here, I’ve managed to finally secure a cable I needed to hook up my USB DVB-T tuner to an outside antenna. I’ve subsequently configured my Raspberry Pi as per the forum post here with the required software.
Basically I have enabled SDR (Software Defined Radio) and using it to decode paging messages on the paging network.
I setup the tuner on Windows at first and used SDR# to find the frequency range. A friend told me roughly where to look and what to listen out for. He said you’d hear bursts every so often. Sure enough I did. I found based on my location in South West Sydney that 148.630 was the band that enabled me to get what I needed.
If you get it working, you will see output like so from the command line below;
Command:
rtl_fm -f 148.630M -s 22050 | multimon-ng -t raw -a POCSAG512 -a POCSAG1200 -a POCSAG2400 -f alpha /dev/stdin
Output:
POCSAG1200-: Alpha: 1957499:XMPROD PET_SYD_WATER_2 Regular heartbeat 1 to VHA
It appears that the paging network is still very much used by many. From looking at what comes over it, you can see that the medical industry uses it, in addition to other corporations for notifications etc.
I should add I found the following page helpful too. Click here.
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