Abstract: A hand held pager is disclosed which displays a transmitted message in hard copy form on a tape to permit a written record of the message for readout at the convenience of the recipient of the message. The hard copy pager is provided with a printing system in which the printing medium is continually moved past the printing head without significant degradation of the information recorded so that indexing of either the head or the printing medium is avoided. In one embodiment, the pager package includes a cover which is slipped over the main body of the package for providing part of the tape threading channel, with at least a portion of the sliding cover being transparent so that characters imprinted on the tape are readily visible through the cover. Also in this embodiment, a unique address and group call decoder includes a number of normally-off timer decoding elements which are actuated upon receipt of a decoded tone and are cross-inhibited to provide improved shock protection.