Performance evaluation of codes for radiopaging

In Italy, the personal city paging service started in 1981 in the Rome area, and it is now rapidly extending to many Italian cities. As it was decided to improve the service, in particular by adding the possibility of sending numerical messages, a study was undertaken to compare the performance of two widely used codes: the POCSAG and the Golay Sequential Code. A particular attention was paid to the performance evaluation for moving pagers, in different environmental conditions; to this end, a computer program was implemented to simulate the received radio signal envelope affected by fast fades. This paper reports the main results of the study.