• squaresinger@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    No, pagers do bi-directional communication just like phones. Even the old pagers from the 70s used bi-directional communication. They didn’t just broadcast over the whole continent.

    • Bloefz@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      No they didn’t. Most pagers were receive-only. In my country two way paging networks weren’t even deployed. This is why they were allowed in hospitals and mobile phones weren’t, they didn’t transmit. Look up the POCSAG and ERMES protocols for example. All unidirectional. They didn’t work on the whole continent, just per country.

      Perhaps in the US it was different, I’ve never been there. But there they sure were unidirectional. Even the text ones. I still have several of them and I’ve run my own transmitter for them on the amateur band.