Did you know that radio amateurs have our own paging network? Really, pagers, those slim devices that you carried on your belt back in the 1980s and 1990s. The devices with batteries that would last for weeks!
The Decentralized Amateur Paging Network was built by hams to provide the backend infrastructure to send messages to your personal amateur radio paging device. And if you’re running Pi-Star, you already have what is needed to turn your local hotspot into a POCSAG paging node on the DAPNET!
You also need need a pager. The AlphaPOC 602R seems to be a popular model that will work on the 70cm amateur band. The default paging frequency seems to be 439.9875 MHz and that is what Pi-Star will use unless you change it.
I wanted to play around with ham radio paging but, since I don’t have a ham radio pager available, I improvised. Isn’t that what amateur radio is all about? I wrote a python3 program to take inbound pages to my RIC (pager identification code) and send them to my email. I’ve shared the code on github and invite you to use it, comment, and contribute.
How can you use amateur radio paging? DX spots, APRS weather alerts, and solar activity are a few applications that come to mind. Share your ideas and be sure to send me a page via the us-nj transmitter group.
73 de K2IE
Just sent a page via DAPNet! The dapgw2email service is not sending emails, or indicating an error with the smtp settings I have entered. Using smtp.gmail.com, SSL = 1, my RIC is entered as well as R1 = 0001081, and R2 = 0. Here is the log: — Logs begin at Thu 2022-04-28 13:18:02 CDT, end at Thu 2022-04-28 13:25:42 CDT. —
Apr 28 13:23:43 pi-star systemd[1]: Stopping DAP GW to Email Service…
Apr 28 13:23:43 pi-star systemd[1]: dapgw2email.service: Main process exited, code=killed, status=15/TERM
Apr 28 13:23:43 pi-star systemd[1]: dapgw2email.service: Succeeded.
Apr 28 13:23:43 pi-star systemd[1]: Stopped DAP GW to Email Service.
Apr 28 13:23:43 pi-star systemd[1]: Started DAP GW to Email Service.
Apr 28 13:23:44 pi-star dapgw2email.py[300]: Opening log file
Apr 28 13:23:44 pi-star dapgw2email.py[300]: Log file open successful
I have sent multiple pages to myself via DAPNet website, as well as received multiple Wx alerts via ric 1081, but nothing shows up in the log, and nothing in the email inbox. I am forwarding messages to my ric to APRS, and all of the test messages show up on aprs.fi fine.