Ah yes!  I do remember those paging loop transmitters and we had tones 
also when I was growing up in the Los Angeles area.  I had a 
Halicrafters sx71 receiver at the time and it would tune above 30 megs. 
  This was about 1955 or 6 as I recall and the cycle was just bouncing 
off the bottom at the time, so didn't hear too many dx pagers at first, 
but they definitely were a great beacon source since most hams seemed to 
just tune across a band, hear nothing, and go away assuming it was dead. 
Still do.  <smile>


Don w6smb



On 10/19/2010 11:20 AM, Martin McCormick wrote:
> 	Did anybody else used to look for those endless loop AM
> paging transmitters that operated in many larger cities during
> the sixties and seventies?
>
> 	There were 4 frequencies for the whole country, 35.22,
> 35.58, 43.22 and 43.58 MHZ.
>
> 	They made for great propagation beacons because most of
> them ran a voice loop 24 hours a day or at least much of a day.
> The loop usually consisted of a station ID plus any pending
> messages for subscribers to the service. Some companies like the
> one in Oklahoma City on 35.58 MHZ used coded references so as to
> give some degree of privacy to the customers. A typical message
> might have sounded like:
>
> 	This is RadioCall paging service in Oklahoma City paging
> 252, Call your office. 873, Your daughter called and needs to be
> picked up at the store.
>
> 	The loop would run about 30 seconds and then repeat. If
> you were a subscriber to the service, you would carry a fixed
> receiver and switch it on every 15 minutes or so to see if there
> was anything for you. Sometimes, the tape loop would stop and
> they would send tones out to activate beepers for certain
> customers who did not need to listen to the tape loop. After
> that, the loop would resume.
>
> 	When things were really going great guns, you could hear
> a handful of heterodynes on each of those channels and it took
> some concentration to dig out each of the voices to see where it
> was.
>
> 	I talked briefly to the fellow in Oklahoma City who ran
> that service and he told me that they started in 1955. One of
> their first hand-held receivers was a long skinny thing that had
> peanut tubes in it.
>
> 	He told me that the transmitter in Oklahoma City was 250
> Watts. Being an AM transmitter, it was the bain of the folks who
> ran public address systems in the hotels and businesses in Down
> Town OKC. It was not uncommon to hear RadioCall Paging Service
> as a background to whatever was supposed to be on the speakers.
>
> 	RadioCall went silent around 1980 and most of the rest
> of those similar systems around the country had gone away even
> before that. It was interesting while it lasted.
>
> 73
>
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