Sadly, yes I'm still tied to a old-fashioned one-way pager. I'm looking forward to the day that it's not one of the regular items in my purse anymore.

Do you find it that much more reliable than a cell phone?

It would be nice if people would just learn what the vibrate mode is for.

Well, I personally use a cellphone. However, my friend who works in a hospital uses his pager when he's on call. Outside of his work, he uses his cell phone.

Pagers are still around and still used but it's much more specialized. The coverage area is STILL very very large and pretty much solid within a company's area as it only needs to be one way in most cases. Two way coverage is nowhere near as universal.

Paging survives as the equipment is inexpensive and fairly simple (no return path to worry about, less power requirement), and there's a hard-core installed base of users that ain't going anywhere. Numeric and one-way Alpha services still exist. Most pagers now (at least the alphas) are reachable via Email, and/or a web interface where message are sent from. Back when, we had devices called Alphamates. They were a keyboard with an integral one-line LCD screen and a modem. You scrolled through to find the user you wanted, then typed in the message and hit "send". It dialled up the pager terminal and away it went.

Motorola got out of the equipment business about four years ago, but Daviscomms and Unication still make equipment. I believe Unication purchased the Motorola tooling and makes duplicates of the Advisor Elite. Daviscomms makes pretty accurate clones. Also, TONS of old Moto stock is available... they can be refurbished endlessly. Your 'brand new' pager may simply be a new housing around electronics manufactured in 1992!USA Mobility was Metrocall, they still have extensive local and nationwide coverage.

As for VHF paging and PageNet... they were bad news but they certainly didn't sink the industry on their own. They were gone way before paging went into massive decline. Blame advanced features on cellphones for that. Text messaging eliminated the need for pagers for almost all consumers.

I ditched the pager when I got my first cellphone in 1989.

Funny how the medical field was the first to use pagers, (Since the 70's?) and they may be the last ones to use them.

Motorola is not completely out of the paging business, they still make pagers, encoders, and the rest of the hardware necessary to support public service applications.
http://www.motorola.com/governmentan...d_803i/id_958i