Yeah, there’s still some floating around out there. They’ve become dirt cheap on the secondary market.
CC
I have a few in my warehouse salvage. Some probably still work.
I checked a used equipment vendor and they have just over 400 in stock of various flavors, for under $200 each.
There is no description of the battery, so I can’t tell you what chemistry. Possibilities include NiCd, NiMh, Li-ion, Li-polymer with NiMh being the cheapest option. All batteries would be aftermarket, as motorola would deny any such battery ever existed. If you ordered thousands, you would most likely get a mix of chemistries.
Thousands of devices exploding simultaneously is impressive. There has to be a uniformity across the board to get this to happen. It seems like a mole would have to access the systems to send the detonate command over the system architecture.
Maybe a satellite could do it on a separate architecture, but now you need a bigger device in the pager/radio and the devices under a roof wouldn’t hear the command.
I will definitely be watching for news on this one.