POCSAG paging project moves forward

There has been a long-going project to do POCSAG paging on amateur bands. Some time ago at Kauniainen Radio Club we talked about that again and decided to give it a try, as we coul determine a handful of services for such system. DX spots could be delivered to either group message or individual customized spots, APRS messages could be delivered to pagers (this is also being processed and projected by Bob Bruniga), tropo condition alerts, club notifications locally etc.

I have purchased a small batch of programmable pagers some years ago and it was time to dig them out, we had started to play with a AVR POCSAG encoder by N2RVQ, but had some trouble compiling the code to a compatible ATTINY-processor. Last night we eventually got things running after finding out that some pull-up resistors were missing from the proto board and the main loop of the code did not run because of that...

The picture shows the test TX (Motorola GM340) and the AVR proto board which houses the AVR processor to send out the POCSAG page controlled from a RS232-line.

I hope to update you with a working page video or other proof of functionality next week!