A SIM-free pager for keeping in touch.
Two pagers can message each other up to 2 km apart, with no phone contract, no wifi and no internet. The battery lasts weeks. And every pager you add makes the range bigger for everyone.
Mayple is a small pager. It sends and receives short text messages using its own radio. That is the whole of it.
There is no SIM card, so there is no phone contract and no monthly bill. It does not use wifi or mobile data, and it never connects to the internet. Two pagers talk to each other directly.
It has a screen with four lines of text, nine buttons for typing, and a red SOS strip down each side. It is a bit bigger than an iPod nano, so it clips on a belt or goes in a pocket. A charge lasts weeks rather than hours.
Messages only get through between people who have both added each other, so nobody can contact you unless you have agreed to it.
What it doesn't have
There is nothing on it to check and nothing on it to get lost in. A message arrives, you read it, and it goes back in your pocket.
Four pagers running in your browser, before you read another word. Nothing to install and nothing to sign up for.
Step 1
The two of you can message each other straight away. Nothing to set up beyond typing in each other's six-letter code, and nothing to pay after you have bought them.
Step 2
Now they can message their friends as well. And every pager quietly passes messages along for the ones around it, so each new one added nearby stretches the range for everybody. Enough of them in an area and the whole city is covered.
They want to stay in touch with friends and family. They do not want Facebook, TikTok, YouTube or Instagram.
In a 2023 study of university students, most said they would prefer TikTok and Instagram did not exist at all.
None of this is a secret, either. The people who built these products have said what they were building, on the record, for years.
A red strip runs down each side of the case. Squeeze both three times and an alert goes out to your group.
The alert goes first, within a second or two. The pager then works on a satellite fix and sends the position as soon as it has one.
Skip this if it isn't your thing. None of it changes what the pager is like to use.
The handset
| Size | A little over 90 × 40 × 7 mm |
| Screen | 20 characters × 4 lines |
| Keys | Nine, plus two SOS strips |
| Band | 868 MHz, licence-free |
| Antenna | 86 mm quarter-wave, along the edge |
| Range | 300 m to 2 km typical |
| Battery | 6 to 10 weeks of normal use |
| SIM / data | None |
Range, in detail
Two handsets, both held at about chest height. There is no single honest number for radio range, so here are the conditions with it.
| Dense town, street level | 300 m – 1.5 km |
| Straight road, sightlines | Up to 2 km |
| Open flat ground | 2 – 3 km |
| One end about 30 m up | 10 – 15 km |
| In a pocket | Roughly half |
Where the battery goes
Sending costs almost nothing. Ten short messages a day is about fifteen seconds of airtime, or a tenth of a milliamp-hour. Waiting for a message is the entire power budget.
| Listening strategy | Draw | Runtime | Delay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Always listening | 5.5 mA | 2.5 days | None |
| Sips every secondChosen | 95 µA | ~4 months | ~1 s |
| Checks every 5 min | 80 µA | ~5 months | Up to 5 min |
The radio wakes for ten milliseconds every second to sniff for a carrier, then goes back to sleep. The sender leads with a long preamble so it cannot be missed in the gap. On paper that is months; in practice budget six to ten weeks, once radio noise, regulator draw and self-discharge take their cut.
Antenna, power and height
The size of the case is set by the antenna rather than by styling. At 868 MHz a quarter-wave antenna is 86 mm long, which fits along the long edge as a proper wire. A chip antenna squeezed into a body this small throws away 5 to 8 dB.
In the UK the 869.4–869.65 MHz sub-band allows 500 mW instead of the usual 25 mW, at up to 10% duty cycle. That is about 13 dB, or roughly double the range. At ten short messages a day you are nowhere near the duty limit.
Even so, height beats power. Past about 25 metres over open ground the loss climbs with the fourth power of distance rather than the second, so doubling transmit power buys far less than doubling height. It is why every pager relaying for the others does more for coverage than a bigger transmitter would.
Four pagers running in your browser. Send a message, drag someone out of range, and watch it hop through a friend instead.
Mayple is still being built. If you want to know when there are pagers to buy, leave your email and we will tell you when there are. Nothing else, ever.
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