Pager Service Repairs

My pager isn't working, What do I do?

If you exclude "My dog ate it" or "I dropped it in the river/lake/toilet" (neither of which is usually repairable), the two most common reasons a pager does not work are "Wrong/Bad Battery" or "Dropped one to many times".

In today’s battery dependent world, one would not think this would be a problem, but it is. Quite often when a customer sends in a "broken" pager it will have a bad battery. We try to resolve this without making the our customer feel like a fool. Normally, before we send the unit in for repair, we try a different battery just in case the customer got a bad one out of a pack. When we remove the battery, we observe the way the battery was installed, as often we find it to have been installed backwards and when it's put in correctly, it will solve the problem.

Another common problem is "Use of batteries that are not alkaline". When a person puts them into their flashlight, they can’t see any difference because both kinds will make the flashlight light up, but there is a huge difference in performance. The old style "regular" batteries will not hold their voltage under load as well or as long as alkaline batteries. When a non-alkaline battery is used, the battery life will be very short or not work at all. The display will work, but often there is not enough power to properly operate the radio receiver portion of the pager. This leads to complaints of operation in some places and not in others, or "Jim’s pager works there, but mine doesn't". It doesn't matter what's printed on the outside of the battery, how many or how big they write Super Duper, Heavy Duty, Extra Power or all the other marketing terms, if it doesn't say "Alkaline", you should put it into the trash instead of the pager!.

 

Another common problem is "Replaced and still indicates Battery Low". Generally occurs with the GEO40A- (ALA25) model. Solution: Turn off pager via the button menu. Removing and replacing the battery will not solve the issue.

That was a line from an old cop show of the 1960s. But it's still true and often it's hard to get the facts. It's easy to miss something important to reliable pager operation. However, if there are no signs of dog’s teeth, and you have tried the battery thing and it still doesn't work, we will need a couple questions answered.

• Has it gotten wet? We can tell by opening it up, so it's best to get this answer early. It is not repairable if it has water damage, and you will still be charged an evaluation charge and it will be returned to you un-repaired if it goes into the repair shop. So if it has taken a swim, just figure on purchasing another one without sending it in for repairs. You will be money ahead.
  
   
• Do you have an idea of where you were when you missed the page? Sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. If you were at Aunt Betty's in Lake Worth, Florida, the odds are that the pager is fine and you were just out of the coverage area. If you were in a primary coverage area where you usually get coverage, then there is a good chance that the pager is broken. This is an area where you can be helpful to us. We go to great lengths to provide quality service and part of that is the RMA monitoring of our customers for failures. However, there are failures from time to time that can’t be detected by electronic equipment. If you get a rash of missed pages in an area that normally has good service, please let us know so we guide you to a solution. There are a host of failures that could cause this problem and often they are not in our equipment. We can and do get outside interference from RF signals. None of these external sources can be detected by our paging systems, but we can possibly resolve them if we know the details.
  
   
• Are there any other details we should know? Here, we are looking for info like "It works if I press here" or "It worked until my brother sat on it", or "It only malfunctions on Tuesdays". The more we know about the problems it has, the more likely we will be able to fix it the first time and for less money.

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