(MONEY Magazine) – Looking for a way to enforce your teen's curfew? Try a pager, one of those pocket-size gizmos that receive short messages via radio and satellite signals. More than half of all pagers are now sold for family rather than business use, according to EMCI, a telecommunications consulting firm in Washington, D.C. For teens, pagers have overcome their image as a tool of drug dealers and become standard equipment for keeping in touch. Pager sales have nearly doubled since '92, and prices have dropped 25%, with basic models now costing about $100. Average monthly service charges have blipped down roughly 16% in the past year alone, to anywhere from $8 to $20. Today's most advanced models are alphanumeric, and some even come in fashion-forward colors. Callers dictate word and number messages to an operator, who zaps the message via satellite to the pager. Motorola's Memo Express (about $165) can store and replay 15 messages of up to 120 characters each. If numbers are all you plan to receive, you can save with a no-frills model like Motorola's Renegade or NEC's Replay, both about $100. Since callers simply punch in numbers on an automated phone line and skip the human operator, service charges are 10% to 15 % lower than with alphanumeric models. That's one way to keep the family pager from becoming a budget buster.

--Shelly Branch