Help with recordings of POCSAG transmissions?

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firefly9
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Help with recordings of POCSAG transmissions?

Post by firefly9 »

Hi All,

I've been working on some software for decoding POCSAG transmissions but finding recordings to test my library against is actually resulting in some pretty poor test samples.

I've looked around and managed to find a few wav files but been unable to decode them, my software isn't working with the files I've found online and I can't manage to make Multimon-ng work with these files either.

I've got two questions for you fine folks.

1. Does anyone have any samples/recordings of POCSAG that I could test my software against please?
2. Is there any advice on settings I should use for recording POCSAG myself? I'm assuming that 44100Hz is the appropriate rate to record a wav at?

Cheers!
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dcwuk
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Re: Help with recordings of POCSAG transmissions?

Post by dcwuk »

Any reason why you cannot use live signals they are plentiful?
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firefly9
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Re: Help with recordings of POCSAG transmissions?

Post by firefly9 »

Hi, good question.

I actually have a couple of locally recorded signals, however living where I do there aren't that many just floating around.

The problem I have is that the software I'm working on is struggling to decode the recordings I have. Although PDW seems to work ok with most of them.

Ideally I'm looking for recordings that someone can provide and assert "I ran these through multimon-ng and they decoded fine" - the library I'm writing borrows a lot from multimon. However any "I decoded this, it works fine" would be helpful.
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Admiral
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Re: Help with recordings of POCSAG transmissions?

Post by Admiral »

I don't know, but I'm guessing that playing it through an audio amp will counter the original signal that was tapped onto the FM discriminator so it didn't go through the radios audio amp ???
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firefly9
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Re: Help with recordings of POCSAG transmissions?

Post by firefly9 »

Just to revisit this very old thread....

I never managed to get multimon-ng to work with any pocsag messages - either by playing back recordings, my connecting it to my tap etc - never.

My solution ended up using PDW on a windows machine, I've got it just listening to the microphone socket with the scanner audio line into that. It took a few tries to get the volume levels to a place where PDW was happy but it's working nicely.
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