Help Using the phone as a Pager?

[EMSguy]

Hey guys, so I'm not really a tech guy, so this may seem like a really stupid question to those of you that are. I work part time as an EMT, but unfortunately there's a pager shortage so mine often ends up being lent out. I would love it if there was a way to turn my Droid into a pager!
BTW, if this helps, the pager that we normally work with is the Motorola Minitor.

 

[phaze3131]

I think if they just press 5 it sends you the number the person puts in. Only difference is they have to wait for it to ring to go to voicemail and then press 5 and the number to call back.

but if your work is doing the paging you can set it up to receive calls from that number and automatically forward to voicemail so they can just press 5 and bam it's done.

 

[Medic_in_SC]

What he's looking for is to get the fire/ems frequency so he can listen for calls, as if it were a radio or voice pager.

The dispatch center sends out a series of tones that open and alert the pager, then it begins receiving the radio signal with the voice traffic.

Since the phone is not set up to scan these frequencies, I don't think this could be done. However, if you could get the dispatch center to broadcast their traffic over a website as well, maybe you could leave it active in your browser, much like on firehouse.com.

Good luck.

 

[Inphosys]

Have them send an e-mail to <YourPhoneNumber>@vtext.com and it will show up on your Droid as a text message. So if your cell phone number is 843-555-1212 ... the folks at your dispatch center would send an e-mail to 8435551212@vtext.com

160 character limit still applies.

 

[discohornet]

What he's looking for is to get the fire/ems frequency so he can listen for calls, as if it were a radio or voice pager.

The dispatch center sends out a series of tones that open and alert the pager, then it begins receiving the radio signal with the voice traffic.

Since the phone is not set up to scan these frequencies, I don't think this could be done. However, if you could get the dispatch center to broadcast their traffic over a website as well, maybe you could leave it active in your browser, much like on firehouse.com.

Good luck.

if THAT is the case then this would be one sick app if a dev ever decided to embark upon it!

 

[johny7]

Yes, have them send an e-mail to <YourPhoneNumber>@vtext.com and it will show up on your Droid as a text message. So if your cell phone number is 843-555-1212 ... the folks at your dispatch center would send an e-mail to 8435551212@vtext.com.

However, this will only send a SMS/text message to your phone. What if you are away from phone sleeping? Ideally, you want a pager like functionality which beeps!

Use this android app - SMS Alert (SMS Alert - Android Market) which will allow you to put in a text filter (for e.g. emergency, urgent, or anything else you want), and this will RING your phone when incoming SMS message has words like "emergency", "urgent" or anything you put in the keyword filter. If it finds "emergency" (the keyword filter you entered), it will actually RING your phone. Amazing, isn't it?

 

[RahPwr]

There is an app called "Red Alert Navigation" that I have not gotten to work that sounds really slick if it did.

It takes the text paging like the others here describe and looks it up on Google Maps. I wish it had some configuration or logic, my pages always preface the address with "LOC-"...if it knew how to look for that it'd be easy.

If you simply want text paging you need to see if dispatch has email function. In our county whenever an event is created for a certain agency an email goes out. The only catch in our area is the dispatch doesn't want to manage emails so we setup gmail accounts and then use that to forward to phone numbers as text. Works great.

Very unlikely an app can pull a VHF tone off the air. You'd almost have a better chance of combining in with a scanner app that features multiple fire frequency scans.

 

[billatq]

I wrote a little app for on-call type use like this that supports both SMS and MMS: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aggienerds.beeper

This is particularly handy if you use T-Mobile and get your pages converted into MMS.