Alarms calling cell phones

This is a topic that seems to pop up multiple times a week.

Security systems, for the most part, were designed prior to cell phones being a common item. Most older systems have no practical means to call a normal phone of any sort. They were designed to place calls to an alarm receiver system. If they don't get the correct connecting signals (a "handshake" and "kiss off"), the system doesn't log it as a completed call and will generally try again and again (anywhere from 3 to 10 times) before generating some form of "failure to communicate trouble".

Newer systems (most built since the mid 90s) often have a "pager format" of some type that, while meant to contact a digital pager of some sort, can be used to connect to a cell phone. You won't get the information a pager would receive, unless your phone service has some form of pager emulation, but you will at least get the calling phone number on the phone's display.

If you want more information than that, there are Voice dialer devices and a couple of others that are effectively reverse answering machines that can dial one or more programmed phone numbers and deliver a recorded message.

Depending on the details of which model you get and how your alarm is configured, they vary widely in difficulty of initial setup.

There are a small handful of alarm systems reaching the market (as of early 2007), that have such voice dialer functions built in, but are either fairly proprietary systems or the relatively limited modular systems (like Lynx or Simon). Pretty much, you have to look at these things feature by feature to see if they meet your needs.