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General Vintage Technology Discussions For general discussions about vintage radio and other vintage electronics etc. |
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24th Feb 2019, 5:02 pm | #41 |
Heptode
Join Date: Dec 2014
Location: Lincoln, Lincolnshire, UK.
Posts: 583
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Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.
When at work the last hospital pager I used was many years ago. Out in the community we had been supplied with mobile phones for some considerable time. Locally they used to be Vodaphone, but when I left they were EE. As one might imagine, in rural Lincolnshire they were a bit iffy at times. In the early days there was a system in place to re-imburse company use of private phones, but that quickly became impractical with the modern age. For IT use WiFi hotspots became the way to go, and staff used them with VPN connection.The IT department was responsible for service.
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24th Feb 2019, 5:21 pm | #42 |
Heptode
Join Date: Jul 2016
Location: Portland, Dorset, UK.
Posts: 870
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Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.
Yes, I nearly got that model (as a Christmas present) but it was out of stock, it was made by Motorola and was translucent blue if I remember (and about £40 on PAYG), ended up getting a Trium Mars instead.
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24th Feb 2019, 6:16 pm | #43 |
Dekatron
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Greater Manchester, UK.
Posts: 18,676
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Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.
Beat me to it Nick, and "Not for Twos" is (or was) a euphemism for "Do Not Resuscitate.
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-- Graham. G3ZVT |
24th Feb 2019, 7:31 pm | #44 | |
Heptode
Join Date: Apr 2011
Location: Edinburgh, UK.
Posts: 805
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Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.
Quote:
They also worked for 6 weeks on one AA battery and swapping the battery took 30 seconds - no waiting to put the sodding thing on charge overnight. |
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28th Feb 2019, 7:51 pm | #45 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Wiltshire, UK.
Posts: 13,953
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Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.
As well as traditional pagers, there were special "Firecall" pagers that operated around 147MHz. Made by Pye and issued to firemen who had normal-jobs but who were expected to drop everything and drive/cycle/run pell-mell to the firestation when their alerter went off.
The transmitters ran quite a high ERP - many of the areas covered were rural so you needed plenty of RF. I had one such transmitter about half a mile from me and when it 'lit up' it seriously desensed my bioilar-transistor-based 2-metre converter! Annoying, but also amusing because I could seemingly randomly announce to people "There's a fire somewhere", a few minutes later we'd hear the sirens, and people would look at me as if I was telepathic or something. |
28th Feb 2019, 9:43 pm | #46 |
Rest in Peace
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Hexham, Northumberland, UK.
Posts: 2,234
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Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.
I was under the impression that the hospital cordless handsets that staff appear to be issued with nowadays were some form of DECT system. I wonder if some kind of local SMS or messaging system is implemented through this from say the main admin switchboard, who would handle calls locally for urgent staff deployment. I will ask about this when I next visit in a couple of weeks time. My neice works on a hospital switchboard so I could ask her I suppose. I am curious now. Regarding the old callout/standby pagers we used Motorola ones with a simple LCD screen for messages. I can still clearly recall the noise it made. That was the worse sound in the world. They worked on the old VHF paging network and there was a transmitter not far from home so it was fine. They went over to a UHF system and I missed calls all the time on that one. The original pagers just bleeped and worked on our own low band VHF network using four tones to set them off. Except if the fault was on the VHF system, they couldn't call you out to fix it because it was off. The retained fire station pagers or "alerters" as they were known were made by Multitone and worked from a line triggered local VHF high band base station usually installed on the fire tower at the station running about 25 Watts. I looked after those in the mid eighties. I'm not sure what they use nowadays.
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1st Mar 2019, 6:36 pm | #47 | |
Heptode
Join Date: Apr 2011
Location: Edinburgh, UK.
Posts: 805
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Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.
There's a slightly different perspective on Wired
Quote:
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