Conventional analog individual calling

In individual calling, a specific radio is called. Most individual calling schemes involve a sequence of tones. Most schemes have a dozen to thousands of possible individual codes. As a practical matter, more than about two hundred radios on a single channel make an unusable level of traffic. So 1,000 individual calls will usually be more than needed.

Individual calls are usually event-based. For example, a tow truck may be called to give the driver an assignment or an ambulance may be called with an emergency call.

Some Motorola pagers could decode four different individual 5-tone signals (see SelCall above). Some fire departments used this feature to implement an individual signal (using the first of the four signals), a station based signal (i.e. paging everyone from one fire station, using hte second signal), a region based signal (i..e everyone in the northwest region, using the third signal), and an all-call (every fireman, using the fourth signal).