Communications: electrical – Continuously variable indicating – With meter reading
Patent
1987-06-11
1990-03-20
Weldon, Ulysses
Communications: electrical
Continuously variable indicating
With meter reading
34082547, 34082548, 370 92, 455 38, H04Q 100, H04Q 139
Patent
active
049105108
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates generally to the field of portable communication systems and in particular, to portable radio frequency receiver devices which contain reprogrammable memories capable of being selectively reprogrammed by received radio signals to alter the decoding and alerting characteristics of the receiver
DESCRIPTION OF THE PRIOR ART
The design and application of personal communication receivers, including personal selective calling receivers or radio paging receivers, is one of the most rapidly changing areas in the communications industry. Over the past few years, the predominant code transmission schemes used to signal paging receiver devices have changed from sequential tone based schemes to formats based on multi-digit binary code words, and the services offered to the user have evolved from simple alert only and alert plus voice signalling to more complex multi-function alerting with visual read-out of numeric and alphanumeric data. In addition, the paging systems that support the operation of paging devices have grown from small on-site and one-city systems to very large wide area systems that can cover most of a state, or even an entire nation as evidenced by the nationwide paging systems used in Europe. Further, the coding systems used in binary based signalling systems have evolved very rapidly as shown by the recent proposed plans to increase the bit rate of the standard POCSAG code from 512 bits per second to 1200 bits per second. This proposal occurred only a few years after the POCSAG code was adopted as a standard.
The rapid pace of technological change in the paging industry has made the efficient operation of paging systems a very difficult task. Quite frequently, a paging system operator finds that the radio pagers that were purchased last year do not have all of the features provided by units purchased this year, or worse yet, the two sets of pagers require two different and sometimes incompatible signalling systems. As a result, many paging systems use a mixture of paging receivers and signalling schemes, and the system transmits a time multiplexed signalling pattern that might consist of a lengthy sequence of six tone sequential paging codes, followed by a lengthy sequence of POCSAG tone-only binary paging codes, followed by a sequence of numeric display signals transmitted in accordance with Motorola's Golay Sequential Code signalling format.
This mixture of code signalling formats, receiver device models, and device features causes operational problems in terms of system capacity, user queue time and system flexibility as well as increased costs and problems associated with repairing and maintaining a large number of different paging receiver models. It also makes it very difficult to add new features and enhancements to the system because they may not be compatible with the older units which cannot be thrown away or obsoleted because they represent a large monetary investment.
Some reprogramming capabilities have been provided for communication devices such as mobile radio telephones in that certain personalizing characteristics of the radio can be encoded in an electrically erasable PROM which can be field programmed. The radio unit is connected to some sort of field test fixture which overrides the internal commands to cause reprogramming of the information, generally in a specific reserved memory area. While such developments enable a much broader utilization of devices in communication systems, direct access to the device is required to enable any changes to be made. Such prior art developments fail to recognize that an ideal communications system would enable a transmission station to exercise complete control over all of the characteristics of the plurality of receiver devices to which it is capable of broadcasting. Since a large proportion of communications systems are one-way (i.e. paging systems), this would enable the central transmission station or terminal to control the total message throughput capability of the plurality of rec
REFERENCES:
patent: 4422071 (1983-12-01), de Graaf
patent: 4518961 (1985-05-01), Davis et al.
patent: 4623887 (1986-11-01), Welles, II
Davis Walter L.
Sirang Nasrin
Ingrassia Vincent B.
Macnak Philip P.
Motorola Inc.
Weldon Ulysses
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