Anyone into radios/Police scanners/ etc?

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heh yeah, you really had to be careful not to give out any personal info if you had a cordless/and or cell phone (credit card info, SSNs, etc), you would never know who was listening. I remember trying to pick up my own 49 Mhz phone and fortunately the thing was scrambled. You could also pick up cell calls on UHF TV channels in the high 70's/low 80's. They eventually nixed those channels so tv's from then on only went up to 69. (then the cell phones were on the rest.) Heck, there was a time when cordless calls could operate slightly above 1600 khz. the FCC eventually extended the AM band to 1700, so some AM radios could pick up cordless calls! I dont think there were too many of these phones in existence however.



It most likely is morse code all though I don't think any of the police dept's around here use morse. I've always wanted to learn morse but always too lazy to bother

those might be automated station ID. and those 49MHz phones really had a good long useful range, up to a quarter mile from the base.

I kind of enjoy picking up foreign stations on a shortwave, especially since the Japanese station NHK has a repeater somewhere in Canada, so I can pick that up. Of course, since shortwaves receivers are somewhat rare/expensive in the US, I only get to listen when a friend of mine brings his receiver over.

I have a very cheap one I bought off eBay and it only receives SW 1-9, LW and AM/FM. It only cost me $14 USD. A real SW receiver though is costly

My first SW radio was similar. it was a Sony ICF-7601, had 10 shortwave bands + AM(MW)FM. I remember hearing my first numbers station wondering what the hell I aws listening to !
nteresting thing about that radio, the FM went down to 76 MHz to accompany the Japanese FM Band. you could hear TV Channels 5 & 6 if you had either of those in your area.

shortwave does sometimes make for some interesting listening, though I've not really had a listen on shortwave for a while, sadly though the possibility of listening to shortwave, or in fact anything within HF (3-30MHz) is under threat from those horrible powerline networking adaptors that are used by people that are too lazy to run CAT5 cable around their house or use a wireless router, a shame really

Hello, fellow radio nuts!

I've been licensed (US Amateur Radio) since age 11, although much less active these days. The one thing I miss about living at home was the antenna space! I had the whole roof to my choice of doings... several verticals for VHF and a Mosley TA-33 for 10-20m, which I put up myself at age 12, scared my parents to death watching me do it but the worst I did was a minor cut slicing off a wire tie I should have placed elsewhere after I had the hard stuff already done. Even built a custom thrust bearing sort of deal so I could (very slowly) turn it with a TV rotor. We also had a fairly flat 100x80 back yard, perfect for an 80m loop, which I put up 20ft above ground using PVC tubing guyed back the surrounding fence. With 70 ft pine trees on two sides of the property, I also managed to string up a G5RV-style multiband dipole at about 50ft using a slingshot... That was a very versatile antenna!

Using a kenwood TS-140, I was able to collect QSL cards from all over the world, which eventually became my wallpaper. Great memories, taught me early in life I'm capable of anything if my heart is in it.

The sunspot cycle is kicking back in, we are close to the solar maximum... I wish I had land to start another antenna farm. However, my experiences in radio mostly served their purpose: taught me all about electronics, introduced me to computers via RTTY and packet radio, which led me to a rewarding IT career.

How did it all start? Well, my parents bought me a hand-held CD radio, the big ole 80s kind with the big telescopic antenna... That introduced me to the local CB folks, and one of them had decided to get his amateur radio ticket. Owning an electronics business, he had a warehouse with all sorts of electronic toys (meters, scopes, soldering gear, you name it) and we used that space to not only learn electronics, but also used his cozy conference room as a morse code roundtable and study area for all the rules and regulations to learn. In a bit less than 6 months, 5 of 6 scored our technician class licenses on the same day, and one guy walked away with a novice as he missed the technician written exam by a few questions. He passed it the next exam session, though. In about a year, I passed the remaining tests to obtain my extra class, i worked at that more than I did school (which I never liked!). I still don't know how I passed that 20wpm code exam.. it was given in a gymnasium with some nasty echo, but the time I completed my 5 min copy, I nearly fell over from dizziness induced by the echo... I think the only reason I passed is I guessed on lots of the words as I copied, most were pretty common and easy to get from context clues. I think the hardest part of the deal was the advanced class written exam - Talk about some serious electronics and math for kid, I had to venture a bit into trig to pass that one... Math is not my strong point. Most rewarding was passing my general... I expected to pass both the 13wpm and the written the same day, and I did... along with radio gear in the car ready to go! I spent the entire drive home (a good hour) working 20m for the first time, having a QSO with a gentleman from czechoslovakia most the way.

Amateur radio introduced me to some great people, some of which played a key role in teaching me many things that helped me get where I am today. I highly doubt I'd be where I am today if I had never got into radio. If this is something you are interested in, by all means, do it!

if maths aren't "your strong point,", but still you accomplished all that mathy test stuff, then i can only conclude that your particular "not strong" must be in objective fact quite excellently strong, even superior!
just curious, with all those amateur radio qualifications, do you think a 1st/2nd class radiotelephone licence would be right up your alley?

I seem to have this ability to learn just about anything I need to the degree required to complete an objective, I guess when I get my mind set on something I'll figure it out one way or another! Luckily the exam allowed non-programmable calculators, so I didn't have to get frustrated with long, drawn out math... but still had to learn the concepts and the formulas behind things like calculating reactance of AC circuits, which for some reason still seems complex to me. Easier to deal with that stuff using software designed for the purpose, haha.

Yes, I've considered the commercial radiotelephone licenses.. I really should some day, just to have it. Seeing that I wandering into the computer/info tech field, that's more of a personal desire -- But the older I get, the more I want to avoid technology all together! heck, maybe I'll wander back into radio as a career someday But something flipped around 30 years (I'm 32 now) and the right brain seems to lead now. No idea what that's about, I'm liking it, just means I spend a lot less time trying to learn all sorts of technical stuff and more time exploring less "logical" things... I can use the balance there, maybe I'll figure out how humans work someday!

Cheers

What you are hearing is exactly what it is.. Morse code over a narrowband FM channel as required by the FCC for transmitter identification purposes.

What you don't hear, using a conventional scanner, is the actual police communications. The majority of departments have moved to APCO25 modulation -- This is basically a low-bit-rate narrow-band trunked digital system. More info on the wikipedia article Project_25. You can buy, legally, APCO25 capable trunking scanners which will decode the unencrypted APCO25 channels. It is not illegal to decode unencrypted APCO25 traffic. But APCO25 supports modern encryption techniques, including over-the-air keying and the federally-accepted AES cipher. These technologies make it extremely difficult to decrypt, although the use of encryption has not gained consistent, wide-spread both due to complexity and inherent weaknesses in the nature of the protocol, which often lead to radios operating in clear-channel mode, especially on talk groups with many radios... So you might be surprised how much is clear-channel and perfectly legal to listen to.

i predict for you, a future in owning/operating your own little commercial radio station. btw, welcome to our neat little aspie station

Actually at the moment I live in a rural section of Virginia and the Bearcat we have picks up the local police. It is the 30-channel programmable handheld typical type with no special bands. The rural areas seem to be slow to upgrade.

In reference to your story, that's pretty amazing for your accomplishments at such a young age. My first radio was also one of those CBs: a 23-channel handheld that was bigger than a brick and had an insanely long telescoping antenna. I purchased it at the first ham fest I ever experienced at age 12.