THE BIRDNET MOTOROLA ADVISOR GRAPHIX PAGER
by Ian McKerchar
The Birdnet Motorola Graphix Pager
Birdnet Information Ltd will be well known to plenty of Manchester birders as a company with strong links to our county and one that produces national bird information pagers covering the British Isles, aswell as offering a cheap rate, regularly updated, recorded bird information telephone service (available to subscribers only) and a bird information mobile telephone text service.
The Motorola Graphix pager is their top-of-the-line model and is said to be the most advanced pager currently on the market. With this pager you receive instant news and updates on mega, rare, scarce and local interest birds, which will include the bird's discovery, location, directions on how to get there and any other useful information.
The pager.
The Graphix is typically sized for a pager, not exactly small (by today's miniature everything standards) but is light, easily slips into a pocket and most importantly has a very large and easy to read screen.
The Birdnet Motorola Graphix pager (right) and Nokia 6230 mobile 'phone (left) for comparison.
That big screen really comes into it's own, with it's 8 line of text, LCD display (easily enlarged to 4 lines for when you've forgotten your glasses!) enabling messages to be easily read at one simple glance of the screen. On receipt of my pager and in typical 'man fashion' I immediately discarded the instruction manual and set about working out which button did what and within 5 or so minutes (or the length of time it takes to sup a cup of tea) I'd worked them out, proof that it must be pretty easy afterall! Navigating around the messages is simplicity itself and various tones can be set to alert the user to incoming messages (just one plain beep for me) or alternatively it can be set to silent and the unit vibrates, which I mainly used when out birding or anywhere I didn't want it to be heard (work for instance). The pager can hold a maximum of 26 on screen messages and 76 automatically stored in folders, with the capacity to hold upto 240 messages. The 26 on screen messages fill up quickly and any time spent away from the pager will see messages automatically moved to the 'trash' folder to make way for new ones but they are still easily read in the trash folder and moveable to another folder should you so desire to keep them (for directions etc). The pager can be set for a 'quiet period' where it will switch the incoming alert off automatically within the prescribed periods, especially useful for those at work where a constant 'beep' would possibly annoy co-workers, it has a programmable alarm facility and very importantly, a back light which comes on automatically during darkness or poor light but can also be switched on manually and the unit apparently features the latest Flex technology for extended Battery Life Pager Reliability (whatever that is?).
The Birdnet service.
Birdnet utilise the PageOne Satellite Paging Network which already has superb coverage country wide but is constantly improving in those areas renound for poor coverage. As already mentioned, messages come via 8 lines of text on the screen and are in an easily readable and understandable format. There is no limit to the length of the messages and one can simply scroll down through the message if the original 8 lines are taken up but I found messages were kept simple and to the point, with all the necessary information, including a time and date stamp for each.
A typical pager message from Birdnet, the downward pointing arrow (bottom right) indicating that there is more information should you scroll down.
June is somewhat of a quiet period in the birding calendar but messages came thick and fast all day long, from real rarities like Blyth's Reed Warbler on Blakeney Point, Paddyfield and River Warbler on Fair Isle, White-throated Sparrow on the Farnes right through the spectrum down to local birds from all over the country, Black Terns in Suffolk, Med Gulls in North Wales and Greenshanks in Derbyshire, any and all birds from all over the country are relayed to the user and this, for me, was the beauty of the Birdnet pager. Birdnet users will get to know of every Yellow-browed Warbler in an autumn fall, Black Tern in a spring movement, Leach's Petrel in a September wreck and the like and whilst I'm very unlikely to shoot off to see them all it does give me a superb picture of what's currently going on in the country, of what I might expect to go out and find in Greater Manchester tomorrow or where I might head off towards on the east coast should it provide more of a lure than Pennington Flash! It offers the fastest notification possible to rarities should you fancy a twitch and should you find yourself on holiday anywhere in the UK or perhaps on that twitch somewhere in an extreme part of the country and you wish to know what else is about around there, there is no need to have to change the areas your pager will cover (usually done by a 'phone call to the service provider) as you receive them all anyway and although some could find the sheer amount of messages overwhelming, surely that's value for money and the whole point of having a pager?
Above: Not all messages relate to birds! Some, as here, relate to scarce and rare dragonflies and also cover butterflies, moths and cetaceans. Other messages I found very useful were traffic details, especially those that were anywhere near the path of a rarity one might be on the way for.
Above: Not all messages are good news! Negative news of a bird is also relayed to the pager very rapidly and as in this instance, continues until the bird is ceased being looked for.
Conclusion.
The Birdnet Motorola Graphix Pager is priced at £197.40 a year or alternatively £56.40 a quarter or £18.80 a month (along with an annual Birdnet membership of £35) and at the equivalent price of a couple of pints of beer a week it struck me as excellent value for money, no more trawling the internet, no more 'phone calls, no more relying on mates, just quick, reliable news whenever it turned up. Birdnet also claim to put out more information on fewer messages and also receive more first-hand information that any other paging service. I had more recently been using a text-to-phone provider which I found expensive, not particularly reliable (too many message errors which costs you credits), covering no where near as many species and annoying when you run out of credit but aren't aware of it (and so don't realise you aren't receiving any news!), so for me the Birdnet Pager was a refreshing and resounding success.
Put it this way, for me the pager paid for itself in one go on the 10th of June, as sitting quietly on the decking at home enjoying a cup of tea in the sun the pager suddenly let out an alert I had not previously heard but knew it must be that designated for a mega, a quick look confirmed it was indeed, the Caelaverock White-tailed Plover had been relocated at Leighton Moss! It was around 5pm and after a quick 'phone a friend' moment, only 5 minutes later I was bundled into a car and we were on our way up the M6, making it there in good time (hardly even breaking the speed limit!) and just in time to see the plover before it flew off never to be seen again (up to the time of writing of this article anyway). Now what price can you put on that?
For an information pack or agreement pack with application form, please ring the BirdNet Office on 0115 871 2888 and leave your details.
Ian McKerchar, June 2007
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