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Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

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Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#101

Post by TylerE »

rsync wrote: post #64
jcrawfordor wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I did use Kuro5hin for a time, but if you have seen my writing elsewhere it is most likely LWN or some miscellaneous technical training vendors, both of which I contributed to for a while before my life got a little crazy. I'm actually currently getting back into freelance writing, so while I have fifteen minutes of fame... my first passion before technology was writing and teaching, and I write and develop t…

OK, now I remember: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11611571 It was Michael Crawford. JohnCompanies, the first VPS provider, and the incubator of what eventually became rsync.net, did all of the original advertising on kuro5hin.org. I actually grew the company a fair amount just on the basis of those small ads on k5. While I was never an active member of the community there I had enough random exposure to it to…

Hah, there's a name I haven't thought of in a while. I had a JohnCompanies server way back in the day.

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#102

Post by jcims »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #69
jcims wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went hogwild with this at the beginning of the RTLSDR era of SDR. I just started picking it back up after getting some better hardware and was kind of bummed at how little the quality of the voice decoding has progressed despite what appears to be a ton of energy invested. If I recall correctly some of it is licensed and/or patented and people are just having to reverse engineer the protocols. I’d pay for a commerc…

You can buy the DVSI codec wrapped up in a USB stick from NW Digital Radio. They call it the "ThumbDV". It looks like a serial port to your machine, and you can just poke it with the right commands and it'll turn raw codec data into raw audio data (and vice-versa). I used it for decoding the AMBE+2 stuff on newer P25 systems. It wasn't great but it did mean I didn't run afoul of any patent issues if I wanted to sell…

Whoa, interesting, thanks for the heads up! I've bookmarked that puppy.

Whatever I was watching recently still had that slurring effect in all of the speech that I recall from back in the day, but I just checked out some recent recordings from OP25 and that is actually quite a bit improved. May just try that out first and see where it goes. Thanks!

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#103

Post by wolco2 »

breput wrote: post #10

I had (and probably still have) a Radio Shack Pro-2006 scanner from the late 80's. Even pre-Internet, instructions on how to bypass the cellular band block were easily found on Fidonet and local BBSes, and all it involved was removing a single diode. https://www.wentztech.com/radio/Equipment/Pro2006/pro2006mod... It was really a golden time for snoop...er..listening to cellular phones because they were so enormously…

I worked at radio shack outside the US in the late 90s.. we use to listen to cell phone calls. Most calls were drug dealers,some were affairs mostly it was call girls. The variety was great.

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#104

Post by gscott »

breput wrote: post #10

I had (and probably still have) a Radio Shack Pro-2006 scanner from the late 80's. Even pre-Internet, instructions on how to bypass the cellular band block were easily found on Fidonet and local BBSes, and all it involved was removing a single diode. https://www.wentztech.com/radio/Equipment/Pro2006/pro2006mod... It was really a golden time for snoop...er..listening to cellular phones because they were so enormously…

I worked at Radio Shack and a customer came in, asked to see a particular hand held scanner. He moved around the buttons a few different ways and showed me it had a backdoor to listen to cellular calls. A few months later Radio Shack recalled that particular scanner. I had spent some time listening to calls and they were really boring. No girlfriends or drug deals, completely inane conversation.

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#105

Post by wolco2 »

I had a weird situation 12 years ago. I got a tv for christmas. When I set it up it scanned for channels. It picked up channels with decimals in the high range and there were pay movies on but when they finished the channel would go dead. The next day I rescanned the channels because of fuzzyness and it picked up new channels with decimals. This time some of the movies were x-rated.

I would rescan daily usually in the evenings and watch what other people paided for. Thursdays and Fridays were good. During the day mostly kids movies.

In the mornings someone would watch a porn fast forward 10 minutes to one specific part.. slow down the video to play 2 minutes then turn it off. Very funny.

If you are in a building let your tv scan for channels in the evenings. If you see a decimal high channels you may have it too.

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#107

Post by rileymat2 »

wolco2 wrote: post #105

I had a weird situation 12 years ago. I got a tv for christmas. When I set it up it scanned for channels. It picked up channels with decimals in the high range and there were pay movies on but when they finished the channel would go dead. The next day I rescanned the channels because of fuzzyness and it picked up new channels with decimals. This time some of the movies were x-rated. I would rescan daily usually in th…

I have seen the same thing.

The most useful part is we could start an on demand show in the living room that had the only cable box, and find it in the bedroom.

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#108

Post by aaronbrethorst »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #27

Hi all, I am the author. I 1) have no idea how this made it to the top position, 2) now feel much guiltier about posting so infrequently, 3) apologize for the design of my blog being almost actively hostile to users, but then maybe that was the point?

Hey Jesse- great story :)

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#109

Post by octoberfranklin »

willstrafach wrote: post #98
1f60c wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this?

Pager messages collected on September 11, 2001. They are also a type of communication which is transmitted without encryption.

s/is/was/

I miss the days when there was a messaging service you could buy in order to recieve text messages nationwide without transmitting your location.

RIP POCSAG

Re: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz

#110

Post by yuhong »

KMag wrote: post #46
LeoPanthera wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/56-bit_encryption

All of the SSL 3.0 / TLS 1.0 EXPORT cipher suites are actually limited to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40-bit_encryption , see for instance page 60 of https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2246.txt For a while, exports were limited to 40-bit symmetric key strength and 512-bit moduli for DH and RSA. I had forgotten about the limits being raised to 56 bits for a few years before being fully dropped by the Clinton administration…

Only for one year (1999). I personally wrote this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
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