Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
BY ALAN D, JONES
D
ighl pagers, or beepers as the reception frequency.
they're commonly called, a scanner radio and a PC, wI p r m l t Pager signals of the type we are
have become exceedingly you to M e the messagesthat are interested In here are modulated by
popular inthe past decade.Pagers of transmittedto about 80 or 90 percent the " d i m FSK method. This means
ail Wnds are d l p p d to the belts of of beepers that are commercially that Re R f caniw Is slnritched be-
mtlllms of people M a ) cand Ws quite avallable, and view them on your tween center frequency +4.5 kHz
likely thaf me of those people is you. computer screen. Mu could, for ex- and center frequency - 4.5 kllr to
A signal Intended for a digital pag- ample, keep a log on dlsk of all mes- represent binary "1"and 3," respec-
er consists, amow other ihlngs. of an s a w iransmWdto your own pager Rvely Blt rates currently range from
individual pager address followed by and verlfy thcrt all were received by 300 to 2400 I d s per second.
the message to be dlspbyed on the the beeper. Also, corporotlons could The most commmty used data for-
pager. Note that the word "dlglkrl" keep time-stamped logs of all mes- mat is P O C X .[Post OfRce Ccde
here refefs to any pager that receiw sages sent to therr in-house pagers. StandardAdviswy Group).Thls codlng
binary data, Inciudlngboth numeric Unlts llke the Decoder are quite standard was cl&sed In a mrles of
[digits only) and alphanumerlc [full effective, and for thls reason are even medings of industry r 9 - m
t q pagers,The mcjority of messages used by law-enforcement ogencla, hosted by British T e r n In 1978 and
in a broadcast wlll be slrnple tele- Wlth such high-tech help the g W 1980. POCSAG is a 32-bbper-word
phone numkrs or dlgR codes, but guys in blue can keep tabs on the synchronous error-correcting code
people w h alphanumerlc pagers deoltngs of known nefarious charac- using a 17-word frame. It Is &cudcast
are Increaslngb making use of de- ters. at 512,1200, a d 2400 bits per sec- 5
tailed fed mesages. often of consid- ond. On mosi paging channels you
erable length. How Pages are Transmitted. wlll hear the &ml mitcMng rupidb
But h o w do you know If the mes-
sages b l n gtransmittedare belng re-
Paglng channels can be fwnd scat-
tered around the VHF 1152 MHz) and
between d~ffwerd ba rates as various 8
pagers are d d r e w d . To learnto rec- 2
ceived c o r m 7 Thsrek no backup UHF (454 MHz) bands. In most metro- ognlze POCSAG by its dlstlnctlve
message generated by paging ser- politan areas, a large number of pap sound, just use fhe search mode on $
vices, ard you therefore hove no way ing channels con be found wthh the your scanner In Ifw -9- to 932-MHz #
of detennlnlw if you're getting the dedicded paging band from 929 to range.Abut90pemntofthe signals $
whole message. Mneeded Is a 932 M U To discover the frequency youhearwillbe~atoneofthe
way of getting a =and look at o UWby a speclflc pagingservlce,just three standard bit rates (see the
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messuge. look at one of their pagers.There wlll "POCSP6S Messages" bw for more in-
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Fig.i. Here is the schematic for the Alphanumeric Pager Decoder. Many sections of
the circuit take their power from two pins of a PC serial port, through DB-25-
connector SOl. Regulator IC3 also converts that power to a 5 -volt source for use by
other parts of the circuit.
Using Your Scanner. A perfectty de- amination of the outputs of several strus:tthe original data by the use of a
modulated paging signal should ap- popular scanners reveals certain Schmitt trigger, There are"!wo oppor-
pear on an oscilloscope as a series of common characteristics, One of tunities for trigger points on the audio
rectangular pulses of varying width these Isthat all DC information islost; if waveform: the Initial spike and the first
(squarewaves), This signal exists at a long string of 1'sor O'sis encountered overshoot. Which one Isbest depends
some point within the circuitry of any (no bit transitions), the output quickly on whether or not the amplitude of
radio receiver. Unfortunately, most settles to a center zero point re- the initial spike is significantly higher
low- to moderate-cost scanners were gardless of the polarity of the binary than the first overshoot. The general
designed specifically to listen to voice data. Another is that any bit transition lack of a major second overshoot is
transmissions, As a result, that nice causes an initial spike of the proper the detail that allows us to get away
(/)
() clean squarewave passes through polarity followed by a moderate-to- with using the first overshoot Instead of
'1:
e several stages of !owpass and high- severe overshoot of the opposite po- the spike, For any particular scanner, .
tJ
Q.) pass audio filtering to optimize the larity, The second overshoot (back in direct experimentation will determine
ill sound quality from the speaker. The the original direction) is usually well- the best location for the trigger points,
~ damped and of much lower ampli- If your scanner has a "discriminator"
'S result isthat the signal available at the
Q. tude, To make matters worse, the
0 external speaker or earphone jack or raw-data output then you shouid
a..
h.' bears little resemblance to the origi- "ringing" frequency is often roughly by all means use it with the Decoder.
~
.<::
nal source.
One of the functions of the De-
equal to half the bit rate of a 1200-bps
data stream, causing transition-in-
Most do not however, So, as we'll see
later, you will probably have to locate
t:? duced spikes to sometimes super- this unaduiterated signal within the in-
coder is that of reconstructing the
~ original data waveform from the high- pose themseives on the first overshoot ternal circuitry of the scanner. A little
ly distorted waveform available at the from a previous transition, work with a soldering iron can bring
40 audio output of a typical scanner. Ex- The Decoder attempts to recon- out an extra pair of wires (or a jack)
providing the desired output. Be- tional asynchronous byte, including sync, word-sync, error-correct. de-
cause of the audio fiitering,you can start and stop bits,at 19,200bps. This code, and display the data stream
normailydecode 1200-bpsand lower amounts to four sampies per bit at a fromthisdevice wouldbe a project of
transmissions,but its pretty hopeless 2400-bps incoming data rate (more greater magnitude than the physical
to extract useful data at 2400 bps for lowerrates),which isadequate for construction itself. However, a pro-
withouta direct discriminatoroutput. purposes of software-based bit syn- gram that performs these functions
Just because you have an accu- chronization. under either MicrosoftWindows3.1or
rateiy reconstructed binary data The work of determining the data MicrosoftWindows95 is available at
stream doesn't mean that the prob- rate and subsequently convertingthe no charge via the Internet at http://
lem of interpreting pager signals is data to a usable one-bit-per-data-bit www.cylexinc.com/downioad.htmor
solved. We could try level-translating stored format isstillhandled by the PC from ftp.gernsback.com. This pro-
the signal to RS-232voltages and itself.Theadvantage of thismethod is gram decodes POCSAGat all three
feeding it Into a serial port, but the that since data isreceived by the PC standard rates; ifyou need to decode
foilowingmust be considered: (1)bit serial port In the standard way, the another coding format you willneed
rates may change unexpectedly,and usual operating-system-supplied se- to write your own software for now.
(2) POCSAGis a 32-blt synchronous riaiport device driverscan be used to Note that any program accepting
format that Is incompatible with the receive and initiailybuffer the data. data fromthis device must be capa-
data input mechanism of the type of Thisbuffercan be occasionallyread ble of accommodating a never-end-
UARTthat is normaily used in PCs. and analyzed by an application pro- ing stream of 19200-baud data and
There is some temptation to solve gram that, because ofthe bufferingin performing a fair amount of com-
both of these difficulties by feeding the device driver,can easiiy run in a putation on that data at real-time
the signal to a "handshake" line of the multitaskingenvironment. speeds. It is necessary to use a rea-
serial port (instead of the normal data The writingof PC software to bit- sonably fast PC to run such a pro-
line) and using highiy timing-intensive
software to measure individual bit
transitions in order to determine the
current bit rate and extract the cor-
rectly synchronized data words. In
fact, there exist products on the mar-
ket that do exactiy this, and the Inge-
nuity that must have been required to
write such software issomething to be
admired. The disadvantage of this
approach isthatthe software running
on the PC must perform timing tasks at
the sub-millisecond level ina way that
essentiaily prohibits operation under
multitasking operating systems such
as Microsoft Windows. Such programs
tend to run under MS-DOSoniy and
must "own" ail the CPUtime inorder to
function correctly.
The Decoder overcomes this disad-
vantage by adding one more pro-
cessing step between the recon-
structed data stream and the PC
serial port. A Microchip PIC16C54 mi-
croprocessor is used to reformat the
data into a form that isacceptable to
a standard PC UART. In order to retain is
I1
the versatility and general ap- ii
:::
plicability of this device for future ap-
plications In decoding other digital ~
,"
data stream formats, the embedded "1
0
software for the PICCPUoperates sim- "0
co
ply as a constant-rate sampler, con- ~
IT
tinuously taking samples of the state 15
of the data stream at approximately $)
9600 samples per second. Each time g
1)
(J
a group of eight samples has been
accumulated, the group is transmit-
ted to the PC serial port as a conven- 41
gram; we recommend a 33 MHz 486
as a minimum.