Abstract: A scanning radio reciever for a wide area paging system which interconnects conventional radio common carriers (RCC) for broadcasting page information. A plurality of RCC's in each geographical area served by the paging system of the invention are connected to a local page processor. The local page processor processes incoming page information and transfers the information to an available RCC for broadcast in the local area. If broadcast of the page information is also desired in a remote geographical area, a copy of the page information is transferred to a central page processor for distribution to the selected remote geographical area for broadcast. The paging receiver is designed so that it scans the frequency of a plurality of RCCs. Thus, the same receiver may be used to receive pages from more than one RCC.