Swatch – The Beep (2016)

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22 points·bkfh··8 comments

> The OP's Swatch styling looks a lot like the newly released mechanical Swatch, the "Sistem" (sic, Sigh) 51.

For what it's worth, 'Sistem' is Romansh for 'System'. And Romansh is one of the official languages of Switzerland.

Interesting. I wonder which paging protocol was used, eg. POCSAG or FLEX, at what baud rate, and whether it's possible to open it up and adjust the frequency of the inbuilt paging receiver.

EDIT: from this article it seems the Beep used POCSAG. If you could adjust the frequency it might be usable with the paging network that my team manages today.

https://www.rcrwireless.com/19981109/archived-articles/swatc...

If those lines across the top glass are wire, and that’s the antenna for receiving data, then probably not.

Assuming it can only receive numbers and not alphanumeric text, our encoders probably can't encode the message format it expects anyway, since they are different formats in the POCSAG spec and we don't support numeric messages.

You can see an actual TV ad of this watch on YouTube (8:45 min) https://youtu.be/zpkwT-cOf4M?t=523

I'm amazed you managed to find that, 8 minutes into a block of random TV commercials.

Some of these ads really could be from this year. Not so much is changed in peoples’ style the last 25 years. I think advertising from 1965 looked much older in 1990.

We'll never find out who he needed to call back.

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