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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

#91

Post by 1f60c »

mherdeg wrote: post #83
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…

Roughly in this genre, the 9/11/2001 pager text data ( https://911.wikileaks.org/files/index.html ) are an interesting peek inside people's putatively private conversations.

What is this?

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

#92

Post by proverbialbunny »

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?

That and in 1999, if you were writing cracks, very few people were doing that in the demo scene at that point. The demo scene and the scene split up. In 1996 RNS started this change. By 1999 pre nets were already up, as well as top sites.

I miss the 90s. I was 12 years old in 1999, but I started disassembling code when I was 8, so as you can imagine, people online thought I was an adult with all of illegal things I did. I even broke into PayPal and bragged about it. lol embarrassing today.

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

#93

Post by hinkley »

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…

In college I worked at a place that was spread out over a number of buildings on the edge of campus. A friend of mine was living across the street from the main building, and I was over one day trying to watch TV in their common room. I don’t recall why I was flipping channels up near 90 but I distinctly heard a crisp clear voice as I was flipping between two channels.

The wireless headsets the receptionists had were using the same modulation as TV, and you could hear it by holding the UHF dial on the TV between clicks. And my friend knew about this. Awkward.

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

#94

Post by koyote »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #92
gaustin wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That and in 1999, if you were writing cracks, very few people were doing that in the demo scene at that point. The demo scene and the scene split up. In 1996 RNS started this change. By 1999 pre nets were already up, as well as top sites. I miss the 90s. I was 12 years old in 1999, but I started disassembling code when I was 8, so as you can imagine, people online thought I was an adult with all of illegal things I d…

I too miss those days...

That being said, I feel like back then a most vulnerabilities were so simple due to lack of foresight/security that quite a few 12-year olds with a decent understanding of computing could perform them:

I fondly remember an IIS bug which allowed you to basically 'cd' into any directory on the host machine and execute cmd.exe remotely. I believe it was as simple as the server not sanitising '..\' when written using unicode escape characters...

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

#95

Post by lilyball »

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/

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

#97

Post by crazygringo »

That's a fascinating story.

I'm curious though -- since the rule no longer has any practical relevance, is it still enforced?

Since it's not particularly likely that Congress would ever get around to updating the law anytime soon... does the FCC still even care? If a hardware manufacturer openly tried to sell a receiver that could tune to those frequencies, would they still be stopped?

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

#98

Post by willstrafach »

1f60c wrote: post #91
mherdeg wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roughly in this genre, the 9/11/2001 pager text data ( https://911.wikileaks.org/files/index.html ) are an interesting peek inside people's putatively private conversations.

What is this?

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

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

#99

Post by jessriedel »

tinalumfoil wrote: post #75
jessriedel wrote: post #72

Could somebody summarize the answer please? I'm trying to decide if it's interesting enough to read, and the first 20 paragraphs suggest not.

I enjoyed it but if you're 20 paragraphs in and bored I doubt you'd find the rest interesting.

I've read plenty of technical papers that have interesting ideas buried in tons of bad prose. Holding the interestingness of the central idea fixed, there is no limit to how boring a writer can make things.

In general, I don't understand why blogs (and HN) are allergic to abstracts.

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

#100

Post by rootw0rm »

rasz wrote: post #86

>not particularly difficult to intercept the call setup process from an AMPS phone and swipe its identification numbers, allowing you to basically steal someone else's cellular service. You can imagine that this was popular with certain criminals with a need for untraceable but convenient communications. and Kevin Mitnick https://www.cnet.com/news/q-a-kevin-mitnick-from-ham-operato... "I was cloning my cell phone to…

FREE KEVIN
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