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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

#161

Post by rachelbythebay »

lilyball wrote: post #95
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…

Coincidentally, Rachel By The Bay had a post just today that included listening in on cordless phone conversations by neighbors. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/12/12/scan/

Not a coincidence! I read this and wanted to share my two cents. Having recently mentioned the upper end of the old TV band didn't hurt, either.

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

#162

Post by o-__-o »

gaustin wrote: post #76
o-__-o wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op, but fun story to share. The year was 1999, I had befriended a strange group of friends from an IRC support channel. We all lived within 250 miles of each other and one day decided to have a gathering with about 6-7 randoms from the channel. Hilarity ensued as we played games of command and conquer, Starcraft, and Serious Sam. I was yelled at for saturating the 1.5mbps SDSL line with my webcam, streaming views…

Serious Sam didn't come out until 2001. How did you play it in 1999?

Definitely meant to say counter strike, sorry

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

#163

Post by raducu »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #114
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stories please!

One of my friends who was a huge scanner fan (did you know they had their own magazine?) worked in a boring mundane part of his family's business. Most of his day was spent waiting around for two or three loads of paperwork to come in to be filed. It was a make-work type of job to keep him employed and out of trouble. What he did most of his day was listen to the scanner. Mostly police and fire calls but he did modif…

You are just describing every IDF soldier ever?

They routinely kill and maim palestinian teenagers with 0 consequences, so there must be a huge part of society that agrees with such ideas that they are able to do so with impunity.

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

#164

Post by majewsky »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #84
foepys wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some smart home devices that use DECT Ultra Low Energy to communicate with their base station. It's a pretty cool tech because DECT uses its own frequency band and doesn't interfere with bluetooth or wifi in the often highly congested 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Even firmware updates are possible because the bandwidth is large enough to push some megabytes through.

That's very cool. When I was a kid, a nearby department store (Fred Meyers on 39th and Hawthorne) used a large-scale DECT system for employee-to-employee and paging. Each staff member carried what was essentially a ruggedized cordless phone with an earpiece and they heavily used DECT's "intercom" handset-to-handset feature to talk to each other, and it was all on a PBX with their outside phone lines. I believe it was…

This sounds very similar to the phone network that the Chaos Computer Club uses at their events, the biggest one being the Chaos Communication Congress. Everyone who wants can bring a DECT or GSM phone and register a 4-digit extension, and each congress, several thousand people do. The whole venue, as well, as some nearby hotels, are littered with DECT and GSM base stations. There's also bidirectional interconnectivity to the regular phone network. It's always one of my favorite parts of Congress, but it has kind of ruined me since I have trouble taking tech conferences without their own phone network seriously. :)

(Cave-at: I'm not involved with the technical implementation. I just know the system as a user.)

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

#165

Post by treesknees »

ryanianian wrote: post #138
INTPenis wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was super fascinating. I had no idea these existed. People are getting automated messages of Mozilla Mac builds being complete during the disaster. I was 16 when this happened so I had no idea pagers were used like this. Sort of how push messages or chatops is used today. To aide developers or ops people with notifications.

Amazon used skytel pagers for oncall notifications until very recently. I had one in 2014.

Hospitals and other facilities still use pagers for oncall duties. It's quite common. They're robust and last days without a charge.

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

#166

Post by sevensor »

treesknees wrote: post #165
ryanianian wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon used skytel pagers for oncall notifications until very recently. I had one in 2014.

Hospitals and other facilities still use pagers for oncall duties. It's quite common. They're robust and last days without a charge.

When I carried a pager as an engineer at a factory, it lasted for months on AA batteries. It's been almost a dozen years, so I'm starting to forget whether it was one cell or two. It took me years before I stopped reaching for my hip every time the lights flickered.

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

#167

Post by heavyset_go »

supertrope wrote: post #53
heavyset_go wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, not only does someone not need to be actively listening, they don't even need to save the audio. Just convert it to text, keep it indexed and whatever three letter agency is doing the tapping has an easily searchable record of your communications should they ever feel the need to look into you without you knowing.

Recording all calls is well within the financial and material means of the US Government. http://blog.archive.org/2013/06/15/cost-to-store-all-us-phon...

I agree. The convert to text part was about indexing the content of the calls for easy searching.

I bring it up because speech recognition has become so commoditized that most of us could think of a way to whip up an, albeit bad, solution to this problem using AWS/GCP/etc in a weekend.

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

#168

Post by EricE »

For ever new regulation that someone wants to enact, they should be forced to take at least 10 out.

100 years from now we might get down to a meaningful mix of regs. Right now the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) is like the roach motel - regs check in but never check out :p

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

#169

Post by sellyme »

EricE wrote: post #168

For ever new regulation that someone wants to enact, they should be forced to take at least 10 out. 100 years from now we might get down to a meaningful mix of regs. Right now the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) is like the roach motel - regs check in but never check out :p

Alternatively someone would enact a regulation, and then remove the regulation removal regulation as one of their ten.
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