Before there was SMS...

SMS is pretty popular nowadays. Before the widespread addiction to cellular phones though, there were pagers. A similar principle in theory, the pager network has a slightly more "open" design making it much more easy to intercept text meant for another device.

LadyAda of Adafruit industries brings back the mid-90's in this awesome video showing how to easily reverse-engineer an old Motorola FLEX pager for monitoring pager-network data streams.

Part 1:


Part 2:


Note: Flex and POCSAG have been around forever almost and there have been thousands upon thousands of diagrams, schematics and 'zines detailing how to listen in. For those screaming about wiretapping laws, you are over a decade late to the party.