Re: Beepers can also be used to track you down!

There is one way to track someone with a beeper - you call them,
leave your number, and trace the call if they call back.
It doesn't work for people who only accept calls from certain numbers
(mid-level drug dealers, for instance) or use other authentication
(voice pagers, or codes you dial along with the number),
and it's worth calling them from a pay phone in case they recognize
the usual pay-phone numbers (if you live in an area where you can
still call back to a pay-phone.)

It's not generally possible to locate specific beepers from the miniscule amount
of IF that they generate, especially since many of them work by listening to
a standard frequency and only beeping if there's a specific message sent
to alert that user; at most you could find someone using that beeper company.
As an extreme case, consider Skypage, which is satellite-based :-)

On the other hand, if you're trying to figure out which of the 
<politically targeted ethnic group members> hanging around on the street corner
is the drug dealer, and you know the popular local beeper companies'
frequencies and addressing, you _could_ set up a transmitter that
loops through the addresses and see who pulls out a beeper and heads
for the pay phone....  It may take a while if the beepers support
10,000 or 4 billion addresses, but you can limit your search a bit if the
beeper company or stool pigeons have provided you the numbers of the
usual suspects...  Sounds like a good reason to design a paging system
with a large sparse address space to prevent brute-force searches,
and not to key the address directly off your home phone number
or anything obvious like that.

		Bill, who doesn't carry a beeper and whose sales of
		dangerous addictive drugs are normally limited to caffeine...

HOY002 writes:
 > There is one way to track someone with a beeper - you call them,
 > leave your number, and trace the call if they call back.
 > It doesn't work for people who only accept calls from certain numbers

true.  I don't return pages from wierd or unknown numbers because of
the rash of pay-service fraud incidents.  (Get a 900-type number in an
area that doesn't use '900' or '976'.  Make your number a $20 or so
charge.  Page lots of people with the number.)

 > loops through the addresses and see who pulls out a beeper and heads

Or you can find out the user->id mapping by bribing/breaking into the
paging company, and look for certain numbers being sent as
page-strings to certain people.

Okay guys, I called up my friend and this is what he had to say about it:

1.  The company he works for is for one thing involved in selling beepers and
beeper service.

2.  Beepers respond to something called a "CAP" code.  Each individual beeper
has a unique CAP code.  This code is what is used to transmit a beep to that
particular beeper (as well as the ping.)

3.  The FCC supposedly has information on how to track down beepers (without
the obvious way of placing a beep and seeing if they return the call.)
Obviously, someone that is higher up in the tech dept. of a beeper co.
might provide confirmation of this if the FCC does not (and would they
if such a feature did exist?)

4.   This "ping" signal is used to disable the beeper incase it gets stolen.
What's not too clear to me is whether there is one type of ping that responds
or two, with the second one that also disables the beeper incase of
loss of theft.

5.    Supposedly, the ping is a broad band signal that has 1/4 mile acuracy
per cell, then after that a tracking gun of some sort can be used, which
looks pretty much like a radar speed gun, but has a shoulder strap or something.

Again, this description isn't mine, and I'm not familiar with any of these,
so any questions you have will take a few answers to clear up.  Also, this
could just be a case of bad info.  My friend is fairly trustworthy in his
info in general, however, it is also possible that he got faulty info
from someone else in the company.

I won't metion his name or his company for obvious reasons, but will
forward questions.

However, I did notice one message from an individual who mentioned that
in Britain, some sort of scanners were used to track down unlicensed TV's
and that his buddies used to keep their beepers in Faraday cages.  Since
I stored this message on a machine which seems to be down, I don't have
his name or quotes yet, however this was posted a few days ago 
(forgive me for not remembering your name.)  Also, (again this too
is unconfirmed) another friend of mine who is slightly familiar with
electronics and who wanted to become a piolot mentioned that AM receivers
can cause troubles in airplane sensors.  (Again, I'm not confusing this
with laptops or CD players, etc, but specifically AM receivers.  This too
is unconfirmed, so take it with or without several grains of salt.) :-)

A1 ray arachelian (library) writes:
 > However, I did notice one message from an individual who mentioned that
 > in Britain, some sort of scanners were used to track down unlicensed TV's

That's merely a matter of passively picking up the frequencies put off
by a tv tube.  Drive down a street with a receiver/display and a list
of who paid their tv tax.  That simple.  (My dad used that sort of
gear when he was a spook in the bay area in the early 70s.)