We us mintor 4 pagers. A fire department not too far uses radios to page. Does anyone use either of these or something different to page out. And how well does it seem to work for you. Our pagers work fairly well but the 4s dont seem to be holding up as well as we would like and are trying to figure out if there is anything better.
Thanks
We have minitors I's thru 5's and I have guys constantly asking for they're old Minitor II back. The first problem that I knew of was that the 4s and 5s come from the factory with the squelch turn 1/2 way up. The way to fix this is to have someone with the programing charger go into the secondary scene and turn it down. but as we still know the II's still work better on our antique, under powered and unreliable system. Also you may notice the battery covers are pretty loose and don't make contact all that well. I have both a II and a V and the II hears more and tones out 10 times better than the V. And we won't even get into how the local dealer can't fix them. Guess you can tell I'm not impressed with Motorola, lately
I have been in the Radio gig since the early 1970's and seen it all. Minitor II's were the last TRUE radio pager M put out. They are all miniature sinthized computers after that. My Dept's have tried several different pagers over the years, But Motorola holds up the best. By the way Motorola just bought the majority interests in Vertex Co. Also Motorola doesn't manufacture it's own pagers anymore either, that is all subbed out overseas. I get about 250 to 300 pagers through my shop a year, so i am quite familiar with repairing them.
I have programmed many portable radio's to act as pagers as well, But don't forget you need a valid license for ANY transmitter you use and you probably aren't covered by your depts FCC license. They are getting very tough in my neck of the woods because of unauthorized radios.
We use Bravo Alpha pagers, and some of the older members still have the Minitor II's which work great. I've used everything from I to V and like the II's the best.
Getting some great feed back I want to thank everyone so far. We have just gotten a couple of Apollo duel pagers and they seem to be working pretty good so far. Has anyone used these?
I have used everything from Minitor 1-5 ,shinwa checkmate,relm and Moto radios and alpha pagers. Currently using a 5 and a text message to my cell... having no issues using this system and I also get my text message a full minute before my voice page.
I would agree that the Minitor 2 was the best however the 5 comes close. I have heard great things about the Apollo pagers the V-200 is getting great reviews....the V-100 is supposed to be a great buy . Please let us know how those work out.
I am not sure what model apollo, i will check and see, they are using the dual band because of being on 2 different departments but from what i have heard so far battery life is about the only questionable part so far.
We here in Chicagoland are right there in the 1950's with you Sean! We use Minitor V's as well as alphanumeric pagers for inter-departmental communication and secondary dispatch of major incidents. We got rid of the siren decades ago though. Stay safe!
My dept uses the Minitor V pagers. I haven't had a problem with the Minitor V especially the distance I travel and the building I work in, which is surrounded by tons of steel and heavy concrete, and our dispatch frequency is on the low band