On the other hand, all of that medical information goes over the air in plain text. It is trivial to capture and decode POCSAG [1], requiring less than $100 of hardware: a Raspberry Pi 3 has enough horsepower to handle the 2 RTL-SDR's needed to capture both the 929MHz and 931MHz bands.

Modern security simply demands that pagers go away (or at least be heavily modified). This is not a theoretical concern [2][3].

[1] https://github.com/pvachon/tsl-sdr

[2] https://www.rtl-sdr.com/art-installation-eavesdrops-on-hospi...

[3] https://openprivacy.ca/blog/2019/09/09/open-privacy-discover...

A pager-like device with proper encryption isn't extraordinarily challenging. But planned obsolescence or selling ads is pretty hard to do with this sort of technology, so despite plenty of interest from users, there's not that much interest from companies.

"An information technology worker from Johnson County recently told The Star about the issue after he stumbled across hospital pager information while playing with an antenna, which he bought to get TV channels on his laptop computer. With a simple program, the antenna picks up radio signals that can be digitized.

Except instead of picking up local TV stations, he started seeing things like this, with the patient's and doctor's names included:

RQSTD RTM: (patient's name) 19 M Origin Unit: EDOF Admitting: (doctor's name) Level of Care: 1st Avail Medical Diagnosis: TONSILAR BLEED, ANEMIA, THROMBOCYTOPENIA

It was the personal patient data of a 19-year-old man, broadcast across the airwaves for anyone to read. And it was coming from a local hospital, which was sending the message to a doctor on a pager."

Edit: Yeah I'm not entirely familiar with interference detection, but I would always suspect some HAM somewhere will figure it out and report it.

A single R820T can do about 2.56MHz bandwidth, which is enough to handle both bands simultaneously.

I have struck an old android wear watch to the front of the computer desk just to see the notifications from my smartphone. So when the notifications arrive, I can see it on the watch like a pager and it has cut my need to touch the smartphone for notifications which could potentially lead into a rabbit hole.

Yes a smartwatch on hand can do these as well, but reaching to it will likely lead to smartwatch rabbit hole. I use the smartwatch on the desk as read only, no actions.

Yup. I've got very, odd, sounds for all my "paging" needs. It's the only way to stay sane.

Interestingly enough it seems like 5G will operate in a similar fashion, albeit a little more modern, where at least the client can talk to multiple towers at the same time and send and receive from multiple towers as well.

It's an old technology but it works. Large parts of the world are still installing new paging networks as their old ones reach end of life. Part of my day job is designing the equipment for such networks.

If a response isn't received in an expected amount of time, then the sender takes the appropriate action.

People are far better at dealing with faults than any automated mechanism.

I'm surprised your pager is so expensive. Mine is around $6/mo through my employer.

Pavlov famously rang a bell while feeding his dog, eventually demonstrating that the dog would salivate at the sound of the bell alone, showing an adaptive link between stimuli and subconscious response.