Patent ID: 7983654

Claim:
An emergency pager alert system configured as a private, stand-alone system for high-speed mass notifications of threat information to a defined population of persons within a defined geographic area, said emergency pager alert system comprising: a monitoring station and an associated plurality of pager devices; a closed private radio network for communicatively coupling each pager device in two-way communication with the monitoring station, said closed private radio network covering the defined geographic area and used for transmitting alert messages from individual ones of the pager devices to the monitoring station, and for broadcasting alert messages from the monitoring station, for substantially simultaneous reception by all pager devices operating within the defined geographic area; each pager device assignable to a given person in the defined population and dedicated for use in the emergency pager alert system, and comprising: a GPS module for determining the location of the pager device; a transceiver for transmitting alert messages to the monitoring station and receiving alert messages broadcast by the monitoring station; and a processor to process identification data in each received alert message that indicates whether or not the received alert message targets the pager device, and to output one or more alert signals to the given person responsive to the received alert message only if said identification data indicates that the received alert message targets the pager device; and wherein said monitoring station includes a computer that is configured to: maintain location information for all pager devices, based on receiving location data from each pager device; receive an alert message from a given one of the pager devices and determine a location of said given pager device, based on said location information; identify pager devices at or nearby the location of the given pager device, based on said location information; generate one or more alert messages for said identified pager devices, based on setting the identification data in said one or more generated alert messages to target said identified pager devices; and broadcasting said one or more generated alert messages from said closed private radio network.