Data on the air. How's it encoded?

Originally Posted by Don Rotolo

OK, that all fits.

Go to the FCC page I quoted in Post 4, type in WPVQ32 and hit Search.
I chose WPVQ322 and found it is registered to Cook Telecom in San Francisco, authorized frequencies between 152.825 and 152.855 for service CP (Part 22 VHF/UHF Paging).

POCSAG is by far the most popular paging protocol, and the fact that you can decode ANY data proves that you have the right one - if it was something else you'd get nothing.

Speaking of POCSAG, we have some of that up here and there might be a couple of channels I should probably get serious about decoding

Now I have several scanners since I work in news but my only Computer is my laptop, Asus F3 series.

To properly decode do I need a desktop, sound card and source audio have to be from the discriminator tap on the scanner or can I actually grab it out of the headphone jack on the scanner and into the computer via the microphone input jack?

I'm not to sure about all this on a laptop, on a desktop I have read it's quite easy to do via the soundcard now.

thanks
m