Two way pagers without cell signal or wifi?

General Discussion
1

Hello,

I am opening a family friendly guest ranch in Florida. One offering we have is child care for parents while they enjoy the resort and horseback riding. Each small child is assigned a nanny for the week. While the parents are out and about on the 3,000 acre ranch, the nanny may want to tell the parents of any issues, what she is doing with the child, etc. On the flip side, the parents may want to check on little tommy. The problem I am having is the fact that cell phone signal is very poor and we will not have wifi. Does anyone know of a radio style device that allows two way texting and or paging. I would prefer not to have talking capability so guests will not disturb others enjoying the ranch near them. At any given time, we will have 200-300 kids in our care. That certainly makes it difficult in terms of channels being private. I am hoping to have at least a 5 mile radius. Any ideas? I know pagers are out of style but ranches are a little bit “back in time.” Thank you!

2

Well they are still available, depending on how deep your pockets are. The big problem is that they are modestly priced for what they are - two paging is much more expensive for everything! However - the basic systems are on site - with range in perhaps hundreds of feet, not miles. You can put in some towers, and some linked transmitters, but the price is going up drastically. Satellite pagers from iridium are available and the pagers are about $500 each, but the monthly charge is horrific. If people were technically minded you could give them a DMR radio, many of which have text facilities?

So you can do what you want, but it’s really going to cost. Even giving them a simple walkie talkie that can cover 5m reliably isn’t going to be cheap. The cheapest solution are the cellular pagers, but if you have no signal - that’s dead in the water.