[TheList] Pager Decoding

Sun Jan 10 14:16:58 AEDT 2021

Interesting you mention such a low decode rate Richard, I noticed my 
decode rate drop a couple years ago from 99-100% to 35-40%, despite my 
setup not changing in the past ~8 years. Uniden scanner with disc tap 
feeding a 2 level slicer on the serial port. Another machine runs a SDR 
dongle on the 925 channel into a 2 level slicer from the audio output. 
This channel's decode rate is anywhere from 20-25% with an average 
number of messages. You might try using the command line rtl_fm program 
instead of SDR# / SDRConsole.

On 10/01/2021 3:47 p.m., DogSecurity - Richard wrote:
> Hey Mike,
>
> I'd say that it's probably your volume levels. I've never done the 
> discriminator tap, which may have made things harder, but getting the 
> computer volume and scanner volume just right is nothing short of a 
> pain in the ass.
>
> Right now, I'm temporarily using an SDR dongle. The volumes are 
> (SDRsharp keeps crashing on me so I'm using software called SDR 
> Console) 100% output on the software, 61% on the VAC input. This gives 
> me an average of about a 40% decode rate according to PDW 3.2b01, 
> however I physically seem to be decoding a lot of messages so I'm 
> ignoring that decode rate
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Sent from a mobile device. Please excuse my brevity, punctuation and 
> spelling.
>
> On 10 January 2021 2:04:22 pm NZDT, Mike Trump <mtrump at orcon.net.nz> 
> wrote:
>
>     Hi Guys,
>     Happy New Year to one and all.
>     I have a little query regarding pager decoding using the PDW software
>     and I'm not sure if it's a setting that's wrong
>     or the way I've set this up.
>     For years I used this program to monitor the Fire Service FLEX paging on
>     157.9500, using a Uniden UBC-9000 scanner
>     via a discriminator tap I'd installed in it and it worked good as gold,
>     until one day the scanner just stopped
>     receiving anything at all (it's on the list of things to fix, once I get
>     around to it).
>     Today I tried the software again, just out of curiosity with a handheld
>     scanner plugged into my laptop microphone
>     input, I'm pretty sure I have all the audio levels correct and the
>     software is running fine, but it won't decode anything?
>     I got a few POCSAG messages but that was it, have I messed something up
>     here?
>     Does anyone else here use a setup like this?
>
>     Cheers,
>     Mike Trump.
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