For those that grew up in today’s highly-connected world, it may be hard to imagine a time before we all carried an Internet-connected computer everywhere with us in our pockets. But even just twenty years ago, things were much different. At that time, if you wanted to hear the latest news headlines, you would have to go home to turn on the TV or desktop computer. And if you wanted to catch up with friends, you would meet up in person or make a phone call.
Around that time, the pager was filling the gap between the location-bound information delivery mechanisms of yesterday, and the rapid, instant sharing of information from anywhere that is available today. Even in their heyday, pagers were not especially widely used outside of certain professions — some respectable, and others, well, not so much so — so it is understandable if you are not familiar with this technology. And today, aside from a few special use cases, like in medicine where pagers are still used for their reliability, these devices have largely disappeared.
But the ability to send short messages to a dedicated device over wireless networks still has some appeal. Sometimes it is just minimizing distractions that is important, or perhaps it is nostalgia that piques one’s interest in the technology. For reasons such as these, Finnley Dolfin decided to bring a classic pager back to life, leveraging it to send notifications of alerts received on Mastodon.
Given the small market share of Mastodon and the obsolescence of pagers, this had to be a labor of love. But it is a labor that Dolfin took on with dedication and determination. After a deep dive into the fine details of paging protocols, a method was discovered that allowed sending messages without bothering with the usual authentication methods.
Building on this finding, Dolfin wrote a Python script that leverages a Mastodon API to check for activity on the network. These notifications were then sent with the help of hampager.de, a decentralized amateur paging network that enables licensed amateur radio operators to send pages over Ham radio bands.
This project may not be entirely practical in today’s world, but it certainly could be fun, and it could be a great learning opportunity as well. Be sure to check out the project write-up if you would like to dig deeper on your own. Be aware, however, that you will need an amateur radio license to get this project up and running.
