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A comment on The forgotten war on beepers. Parent comment

Re:The forgotten war on beepers by lxgr on Thursday April 18, 2024 @08:15AM (#40075395)
No, I’m referring to the Iridium pager, which is just its own service and has been around longer than SBD, I believe. Messages were (are?) free to send on top of a monthly flat subscription rate per pager.

GDB seems to be a successor to that, though.

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Re:The forgotten war on beepers by kotaKat on Thursday April 18, 2024 @09:43AM (#40076156)
GDB is just a branding for their own flavor of what they're selling which is Iridium Burst, which also appear to run on the 9602/9603 SBD modules, so... maybe Iridium Burst is just spicier Iridium SBD?

https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-burst/

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Re:The forgotten war on beepers by lxgr on Thursday April 18, 2024 @10:33AM (#40076711)
SBD is bidirectional unicast (and mandatorily so; as you say, SBD can't transmit to devices before they initiate a mailbox exchange, with the exception of a "message waiting" indicator.

Iridium Burst seems to be multicast-capable, and optionally bidirectional or unidirectional, so "spicier SBD" makes sense!

But their paging service was definitely unidirectional and unicast. Here's an old talk on decoding the signal, if you're curious: https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6236_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412281...

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Re:The forgotten war on beepers by kotaKat on Friday April 19, 2024 @08:36AM (#40086049)
Yep -- actually contributed an NAL Shout Nano so they had additional protocol decoding on top of SBD ;)
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