Pocket Paging

When a century-old Manhattan building collapsed last month, killing five demolition workers and snarling midtown traffic for blocks, the N.Y. World Journal Tribune rerouted its delivery trucks by signaling them with an electronic paging device. Later in the same day, the N.Y. Times used a similar instrument to keep in touch with a photographer covering a New York Central train derailment in Harlem.

With receivers as small and totable as a hip flask, one-way radio pagers are now a hot item. Some emit only a beep that tells the recipient to call his office from wherever he is. Others give out a beep-voice combination. Either way, the system is simple in concept: Party A wants to reach Party B, who is nowhere near a telephone. Party A calls a radio-paging center. There, an operator sends out an individually toned beep, or a voice instruction, to Party B, who is wearing a paging device. Party B goes to a telephone and calls in, or follows the vocal instruction.

Using the pagers are thousands of doctors, construction bosses, executives, real estate salesmen and repair men. Undertakers in Chicago contact freelance embalmers by radio pager, and in Miami funeral directors are paged at graveside the same way. Off the Atlantic coast, fishing craft without ship-to-shore rigs are called in by radio pagers when storms threaten. In Denver, one motel-maintenance engineer packs a pager, and an executive beeps his daughter when he thinks that she ought to start home from an evening date.

Among manufacturers of radio pagers, Motorola dominates, with about 80% of the market. Its Pageboy receivers range in price from $180 for low-frequency units, to $275 for VHP. Low-frequency transmission requires no FCC license, is mostly for on-the-premise calls. Low-frequency beepers keep executives on their toes in 66 IBM plants throughout the U.S., New York's Americana Hotel coordinates staff activities with them, and department stores use them to alert floorwalking detectives when shoplifters are spotted.

High-frequency pagers have a range of 15-30 miles, can be rented for about $15 a month. Largest of the companies that operate 151 transmitting stations in the U.S. is A.T. & T. Mother Bell, which provides Bellboy paging services for more than 10,000 customers in 25 cities, has inaugurated experimental direct-dial paging in Washington, D.C., and Seattle, awaits FCC approval of an application for more frequencies.

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