Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio (2024)

The paging system was unencrypted around here the last I looked (that was during covid). And there was software that could decode the transmissions. The SDR would easily pick it up.

One of the hospitals had been using it and would page people with PII -- including which people were in which room. So you could kinda see what was happening in the hospitals -- particularly during covid.

There kinda was a life cycle, seeing people admitted, O2 alerts firing off, and then the morgue being called to a room.

Overall, it was both interesting to have insight into something that you weren't ever going to be allowed to have access, and also very very sad.

very unlikely. you may have read some text pages but not enough to get anywhere near the type of picture you're claiming.

Same experience here with hospital pagers. I tried this way back in 2013 when I first started with SDR. Even without covid, the messages were hideous and depressing. Not recommended.

Listening to pagers is illegal in US from ECPA of 1986. It is the same law that banned listening to the analog cell frequencies, which still applies even thought that is long gone.

There is no way that they will know or care if you don't share messages.

I concur, but for a different reason. This is repeating a narrative that was found to be a policy decision by hospitals in the US. That sentence isn't quite right but i don't have time to formulate it better.

The pocsag data, if this detailed, would have mentioned giving specific patients specific medicine that would then cause their O2 sat to drop. Since that isn't mentioned, either they forgot, or maybe there's an axe to grind.

Nevertheless, having grabbed pocsag in my area i don't remember seeing much PII, mostly room numbers, if anything.