Restaurant pagers, nearly everyone has seen, but do you know how they work?
There are two types of paging systems that can be used within a restaurant. The first is the customer pager that is used to alert people waiting that their table is ready. The second is used by wait-staff to inform them when their food is ready to be delivered to a table. Although these two types of pagers serve distinctly different purposes, their mechanics are basically the same. There are three main components in a restaurant paging system, the master transmitter, the recharging station, and the individual pagers themselves.
We will first examine the master transmitter. Typically a small box with a led screen and several numeric buttons, the master transmitter is the brains of the system. When the operator of this unit desires to send a page to an individual he/she must only execute a simple numeric command to indicate the message as well as which individual pager to send the message to. Once the user inputs the command the transmitter translates that code and sends it on a certain frequency to all of the pagers in the restaurant. The desired pager then accepts the code and alerts the user.
Inside each pager are six basic components that allow the unit to function. The most basic of these are a rechargeable battery, a speaker, and light-emitting diodes (LED’s). The other three more complex components are the motor, the radio antenna coil, and the microprocessor.
The speaker, LED’s, and motor all act as ways to gain the individual user’s attention that a page has been received. A speaker can emit a range of sounds specific to different commands entered on the master transmitter. The LED’s, which are typically only used in a customer paging system, light up in a pre-programmed pattern when a signal is received. The motor allows for a pager to vibrate. This is the most typical type of wait-staff paging methods. This is done, by attaching a small weight, slightly off-center. When the motor is given the signal to function this weight being off-center is what causes the unit to vibrate. By causing the motor to spin at different rates and intervals, several different types of vibrations can be produced.
When a signal is emitted from the transmitter, each individual pager receives that signal through the radio antenna coil. This is in much the same way that a radio receives a signal from a radio station. The signal is transferred down the antenna and to the microprocessor. This processor is the brain of the pager. It analyzes the signal to see if it matches the internal code of the pager, which is unique to each unit, and also compares the signal to a preprogrammed set of codes to see which command to execute. All of these components must work flawlessly work together in order for the pager to receive the command from the master transmitter.
The last component of the restaurant paging system is a recharging station. This is a necessary component due to the fact that many restaurants operate sixteen or more hours a day. If the individual pagers were run on typical non-rechargeable batteries, the cost to operate this type of system would be outrageous.
