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It seems really bizarre to me that it could be illegal to listen to any particular communications, as long as you don't actively take measures to break through privacy measures. If someone is sending photons over my private living space, how can I be violating anything if I can "see" them?
A blind eye is usually turned to such listening. But if you share any information which you might learn, the good eye starts to be used. If you then publish or sell the information, your collar will be felt, and your bank account will go on a diet.
That's the argument against laws banning car radar-detectors in the locales that do ban them. By law you're allowed to passively tune in to any signal that is broadcast, so why is it illegal to use a radar-detector to detect police speed-traps?
My wife is a prosecutor for the state in which we live in the USA. She freaks out every time I find and record a number station, like some government agency will be offended that I'm using my $40 shortwave pocket radio to bring down their empire. Explanations are useless.
@@Skank_and_Gutterboy It's not legal in the UK to passively tune in to any signal that's broadcast. Even as a kid in the 70s I knew this and used to be scared my older brother was going to get a visit from several large men one day, because he always had his VHF radio tuned to the police band. I think it was above 90MHz? Can't remember exactly.
Back when I was studying, one of my lecturers had previously worked for Marconi. He said he was once asked to figure out how the Russians were intercepting a point to point link. He surveyed the area and told them to go and look at a shed which was conspicuously sitting on the roof of a building along the path of the signal. Sure enough, a Russian listening post, in a shack on a roof. No antennas sticking out, the antennae were inside the shed.
My Yupiteru MVT7100 took me to hundreds of places! The Space Shuttle on it's climb out from Florida as it went high over the UK about 12 minutes after launch, the coastguard, shipping, analogue mobiles & wireless landlines, airband of course! The Red Arrows just aren't the same without listening to Red one "Hooooolding the bank..... Now!" through gritted teeth as the Gs mounted. Tucked up warm in bed with headphones on listening to a C130 going around because of atrocious weather at Gander. The eerie Selcal tones echoing down from the ionosphere of aircraft flying the Atlantic routes. MIR always chatting away in Russian as it passed overhead. Visible as a point of light in the night sky just before it winked orange then disappeared as it passed into orbital sunset. I strung a longwire down the garden to see how far i could listen. I got Australian Selcal operators first hit! Couldn't get much further than that! That's just a smattering from the mid 90's. It was a fascinating hobby!
I have an Icom IC-R10 that I bought in the year 2000 (I live in Sweden). It was amazing being able to listen to everything that was broadcast in the clear. I used to listen to cordless phone calls, mobile phone calls, amateur radio, buses, police and everything in between. I even modified it with a discriminator tap so I could decode POCSAG data. It's sad that almost everything has been transitioned to encrypted digital modes now, taking away all the fun :(
I had the same scanner, one day I heard a signal where someone said "we have done the job should I fill in a green form" and a reply came back on the same frequency " no take it downthe bypass and make it look like an accident we will fill out a pink one" that has stuck with me ever since the frequency was on a government one.
@@Equiluxe1 Thus, another example of establishment corruption and smokescreens. What a fascinating hobby though. Where did it all go wrong - digital technology.
i had one too in the late 90's best radio i ever had. it could pick up low band pmr mobiles ground wave up to 100 miles away. the most sensitive reciever ever made i reckon. quite selective too.
Many years ago, I was listening to the third harmonic of 49 MHz (near to some interesting repeaters 😉), when I heard what turned out to be a £2 million burglary in progress - at one of my previous places of employment. Turning the beam antenna gave very clear FM audio and a direction. Then one of the culprits mentioned a road name, a few miles away from here. Bingo! A quick 999 call, and playing of some of the incoming audio to the police over the phone, resulted in several arrests, followed later in the day by a visit from two big CID officers, to see how I had managed to overhear the transmissions. They were fascinated that my FT227R could tune to 147 MHz. (It only needed an adjustment to one internal component to extend its receive and transmit capabilities.) To my surprise and relief, they thanked me, asked me to keep monitoring those frequencies, to report anything else of interest, and left. What they didn't ask me about was that I had been monitoring their local repeater, on an adjacent frequency, when I stumbled upon the clandestine activity by accident. A few weeks later, all of their transmissions began to be scrambled. I wonder why? 😃 So I obtained my first scanner a little while later, to listen everywhere else.
I'm curious - why do you refer to it as the 3rd harmonic of 49Mhz instead of just 147Mhz? Or, better still, can you point me in a direction where I can learn more about that concept? Radio has always fascinated me, and I'd love to learn more about the hobbyist details.
@@Chad_Thundercock Possibly to indicate that cordless phones were on 49 MHz but if it's a cheap transmitter there will be spurious signals (harmonics) at multiples of 49 MHz including at 147 MHz (which is 3x 49).
I worked at Radio Shack (Tandy Corporation) in the US back in the late 1980s and we sold all sorts of scanners. The high end ones could be tuned to pretty much any frequency, and when connected to an antenna mounted on the roof, we were able to hear cordless phone conversations, and all sorts of things. They were very powerful back then, and you could just casually turn the tuning dial until finding something interesting to listen to.
"Martin" emigrated to America where he got a top job in Computers, and I think now is retired living in the Mid-West. I met him a couple of times at his first-floor flat, and I sold him My Ford Granada which ended up being chased (and lost) across the New Forest. Interesting days. His one and the only receiver were an Icom R7000 with a 2m/7cm dual-band colinear on the roof of his two-storey building in Bournemouth.
Back in the '70s I was given a multi-band receiver. I remember sitting for hours at night slowly turning the dials scanning up and down the various bands listening to SW stations from around the world. The number stations were/are fascinating as were/are all the clear channel language broadcasts from around the world. Thanks for posting these. Now that the weather is going to be mostly shite here in the upper midwest US, I'll have some time to go thru your vids.
In the 90's I bought an iCom scanner from an electronics shop I stumbled across in New York's Chinatown. It gave me access to unlimited frequency up to 1300 MHz, if I remember correctly. Since cell phone service was analog at the time, I could listen to local police frequencies and sometimes follow them to their cell phone conversations when they decided to switch to phones to evade the police scanners. Of course, everybody used wireless handset phones in their homes at the time, so I heard some interesting conversations just walking through neighborhoods with an earphone connected to the iCom. Walking through Newark and Elizabeth, I got an early preview of what gangsters talked about, long before the Sopranos hit the air. That was fun.
Where is police uses of radio got a lot more private with the adoption of frequency skipping and multiplexing. Even a simple scanner which could hear the police on the earlier radios could not figure out how to follow the police when they in prearranged order skipped frequencies with automated machinery.
Really enjoyed this vid. Took me back to that golden age of scanning here in the US in the late 80s and early 90’s and the joy of going through the various frequency guides. A younger, happier, and simpler time for me. It seemed everyone I knew had one as teen in suburban Philadelphia. The local Radio Shack was a place to chat Scanning and Amateur radio. We had 3 Scanners in our home. My parents frequently passed on watching Friday night television to go to bed with the scanner on. I decided to stop keeping up with the technology a few years ago, and it appears most police and fire are now encrypted where I live. With the advent of digital systems less info was sent via voice anyway. Listening to a local railroad defect detector and regional rail is the extent of it now.
I remember listening to the Police do a PNC check on my car while behind me at a red traffic light. As I was all legal and local they didnt pull me over.
In the US that's an illegal search. There's an amusing video where Florida police stop their state attorney. They admit that they are in the habit of running plates. As soon as they discover what she does for a living they are backing away like she's a live grenade with the pin pulled. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ZVy9rzWKUBY.html
@@filippocorti6760 Yes. Wait until you find out about ANPR. A modern cop car checks you automatically and tells the officers if you need to be stopped.
I got my first scanner - the Realistic Pro 32 in the late 80s, and had the Tandy Scanners books, never contributed to the Bournemouth PO Box , but remember being advised Practical Wireless and a few other publications I think. Back in those days, you could listen to all emergency services AND know instantly were to hear stuff literally local to you street. Split simplex? No problem- you knew where to have the other scanner monitoring. When an ambulance was called for my aging father - I listened to the Ambulance comms on the event. Great video again Lewis. Brings back that golden age of scanning.
I just absolutely love these historic videos you make. Anyone can do a product review/advert for something they have been sent or hit record while doing a pota/sota activation and present a never ending drone of dits and dars. It must take a considerable effort to research all these topics, find clips and stills, script them and fact check. I know you won't get awarded "youtuber of the year " but you certainly do deserve something. A recognition of presenting and collating some amazing historical facts and records that, I am sure, would otherwise fade off into obscurity. Thank you Lewis and long may it continue.
Excellent story. Ah the good old days. My favourite was capturing the copper chopper's video downlink on 2.4GHz. watching their thermal imaging camera when on a search was awesome. Ofcourse I never posted any footage on any public site, but it did get shared on a 10GHz microwave TV link with a friend 2 miles away. Sadly I havent seen anything for years now so I assume they have gone digital/scrambled. All good fun though. Air1 over and out lol
Here in the states by the late 1980s programmable scanning receivers were becoming normal , but when I started scanning about 1975 I got a crystal receiver and had to order the frequency desired if it wasn't a common frequency for police,fire, ambulance etc. So an odd frequency would be grown and cut for the customer. I was given my first receiver from my uncle that was a chief in a volunteer fire company and it was probably one of the best gifts ever! And when programmable scanning receivers became available it made the hobby much more fun, and places like Radio Shack started producing frequency guides, but having a good hot receiver a high up antenna using limit scanning really helped in finding active frequencies. Now just routine traffic is via radio any "special info" is transmitted via cell phone these days. Being a volunteer firefighter like myself, it used to be the only way you knew you had a fire run or ambulance call-out was by having a scanning receiver "scanner". Cool story, cheers from Pennsylvania!
Classic, thanks mate 😊 My old GRE and Realistic scanners bring back those memories of staying up til all hours scouting through frequencies as an inquisitive teen in the mid to late 90s. Back then the airwaves were constantly buzzing. Could have done with that guide to navigate them 🤣 great times 👍🏻
I really enjoyed that film. Like many on here , that subject rang a few bells,. It was a nightly event.. having a bath and listening to the cops on the radio... Or the odd cell phone conversation. God they were good days!!
Field jobs are sometimes dificult, and unexpected events happens. In police and military operations, Murphy's Laws should allways be taken into account...😅😅
Regarding the monitoring of his phone, I'd love to know more about how that operation was run. When a local exchange was being upgraded to digital (in the 90s) there was a lot of interesting stuff ripped out and skipped including a recording device for just this kind of covert call monitoring. It had a label on it with basic contact details for the group responsible who were based in a city about 150 miles away, so clearly not the sort of thing that your local PO/BT guys dealt with. I'd love to know who they were recording on that machine and why - given how few lines were run from that exchange I'd almost certainly have known them all too!
I started scanning in medical school with a Fox receiver in Philadelphia 1980-84. I would be studying with the police frequencies in the background. I had a little newpaper map of the Philly districts and the frequencies programmed into my radio. Busy town. Later on when I first moved to Waco , Texas and the Branch Davidian Siege took place, I was using a unblocked ICOM scanner and listening to every three letter law enforcement agency chattering away. The best were the local guys on their cell phones talking to their wives why they weren't coming home. "All Hell has broken loose out here!"
Love this story mate. Late 90's I had a bear bearcat trunk tracker. Living in London you can imagine the stuff I heard and even followed in a vehicle. Anyhow enough of that story haha.
I also have memories of a friends dad who used to have a Tandy Realistic scanner. He used to listen to the Police (and everything else). I'm sure he said the police helicopter call sign was India 99. This was around 89-91.
Most police helicopters are assigned the x-ray India 99 call sign, our local helicopter (Merseyside) was designated 'Mike one' and it was based at Mike one one 😉
In the early 90s I got our old VCR to pick up cell phones. Old version had 13 channels you would manually tune to you local stations channel one could ch 56 or 2 or set to around 800 mhz in the high uhf and you could get the frequency of the 2 or 3 towers in your town. Only one came is clear. Imagine only having a few towers with analog channels in 2022? I bet it's around 1000 to 5000 channels and hundreds of antennas with dozens of arrays.
When I first lived in England, the police were on the FM broadcast band. I had a friend who would listen in, even though it was illegal. During my second UK residence, I would listen to utility stations of HF, also probably illegal. I don't know what the laws are like in the UK now, but "Martin" was wise not to publish his frequency list any more. In the US, we can listen to anything except cellular communications, but since they are now digital, it is a moot point. I find your channel exciting. I wish I could visit the UK again to do some serious listening. 73.
As the police were so keen on secrecy it must upset the old school coppers today if they know that especially on Twitter lots of would be coppers (PCSOs) are forever on there talking about the jobs they are on even supplying photos of dodgy cars and vans showing their number plates and even mentioning the names of the coppers who arrested the culprits. One I follow is obvs a complete fantasist as he seems like Craig of Coronation St, gets involved in all ops, but he provides chapter and verse regardless.
@@nobodynoone2500 It's about as sensible as telling people they aren't allowed to read things from a billboard on the roadside. If you don't want it known, don't broadcast it.
It used to be illegal to have a mobile receiver, i.e. to listen into police activity from your car, without a ham permit. Now, of course, Broadcastify makes this totally moot.
You should have hummed the Lincoln Shire poacher song to the secret service agent spooks and told them it inspired you.That would have been ironic. In the early 1990's I was talking to an ex Australian federal cop about the Deakin center in the capital, Canberra. He looked really concerned that a civie truck driver new about the secret file facility that kept a dossier on every Australian citizen and was connected by underground tunnels to federal parliament and the US embassy.
I was a power engineer responsible for standby power supplies at many of these “unknown” or if you like secret radio masts, I’d would surprise you where many of them are as not all are in middle of nowhere
Love the “that’s the building next door” - busted, but with a sense of humour. There’s a fenced-off shed on top of Blackheath Hill; off to the right as you approach from the New Cross area. Used for training & research into radio tracking during the 1970’s. 🤫
I have seen numbers stations videos here and there but your channel is the first one that has really piqued my interest in the hobby. What a rabbit hole
I started scanning in the 1990`s and still listen in on the aircraft & emergency services today . Back in the early years, everything was analogue , or FM which I could hear on a realistic H/Held 10channel scanner. I then bought a Bearcat 500 channel scanner 7 years later, which I still use now. After the big shake up for the radio spectrum , and Police going digital , I could still hear them by listening in on the "link" channels on UHF. They then went entirely UHF encrypted digital, while most of the Emergency , Fire brigades went over to the Government Radio Network on uhf digital in the clear. I had to buy another digital H/held scanner to listen to them.I used either the telescopic antenna, or an outside Discone in the later years. Scanning is the best hobby ever !! I`m in Australia , and the wacky Government do strange things to make a hobby more difficult.
I still have the 2 scanners that were in my "Beast" a modified 67 Chevy Suburban decked out with all sorts of fun stuff: My "Tweaked" Cobra 140 GTL CB radio, 2 scanners: Scanner 1 - Realistic Patrolman Pro 7A. - 8 Channel VHF 138 - 174 MHZ; Scanner 2 - Realistic Patrolman Pro 10. 8 Channel VHF / UHF (all Public Safety freqs), A Kenwood TR-7400A 2M XCVR, an Icom 2m thumbwheel VHF handi-talkie, a Federal Signal Siren/PA - with a 200 W PA speaker up front, All Motorola speakers inside: 1 below, 1 above the mirror and one in the back by the rear mounted 6" amber emergency flasher. I also had a portable amber flasher for the dash or the roof (Preferred, since it did not impede my vision)! If anyone even LEO gave me any sh-t, I had FEMA ID in my personal collection of emergency ID badges (ALL LEGIT), as well as vehicle placards from FEMA, and the LA County S.O. But just to be SAFE, I also had a big Machete tucked on the left side of the driver's seat and an Arkansas toothpick mounted under my seat (this was besides the 12G short barrel shotgun I had mounted behind my seat (Shhhhh)! The morning of the 94 Northridge Earthquake, I was driving around the stricken area radioing in fire reports directly to the LA City F.D. That evening, I was the acting liaison between the LA County Sheriff's and the California State Police. LA had declared Martial Law with a curfew, but I was exempt from that BS! Ahhh, the good 'ol days!
Truley times that ars gone but not forgotten! I remember my first scanner was the Realistic PRO-26 which if memory serves right was probably RRP £300 in the mid to late 90s. 25 - 1.3GHz had plenty to listen to back then - mobile phone and cordless calls aplenty in fact one day I remember tuning around 31 - 31MHz looking out my bedroom window with binoculars to see someone begin a call on a cordless and the scanner sprung to live from a good 1.5 - 2km away. Ahhhh those were the days.
It's around 1988 and I'm in my 4th year (now year 10) Physics lesson we were all huddled around the teacher that had just bought one of these scanners. We were listening into the mobile phone airwaves that were analogue at the time and one of the conversations was of a guy telling his mate about how he ate his kebab the previous night. It wasn't about the take away fast food variety!
Being able to monitor the EMS was interesting before they all gradually migrated over to the UK Tetra Airwave Service with its TEA2 encryption pre 2000,with Lancashire Police being one of thee first forces that took up Tetra with MM02. My first scanner being a Realistic PRO74 from Tandy, then a Yupiteru MVT-7100 and the AOR3000. Also 31MHz cordless phones was interesting before DECT phones put paid to this. Good old days of scanning recievers. And the old 1st generation ETACS mobile phones, Vodafone, One2one, BT Cellnet and Orange.
You'd think with those cordless phones frequencies being so low they'd have a tendency to possibly skip every so often. Wonder if anyone's conversations ever made it around the world! 😆
What an interesting video .Certainly brings back memories on how we listened to the airwaves .My first listening experience was on a binatone which had sw am fm (my parents owned) then i bought a Fidelity shortwave radio got about 1 hour listening before the power transformer packed in .After the 3rd replacement within about a month i gave up. For airband i bought a little pocket binatone radio, had that for years ,many enjoyable hours listening to atc and pilots.Since then Amateur radio improved my knowledge on buying better quality radios etc.Anyway keep the quality videos rolling and thank you once again.
Ugh yes, Fidelity haha they were always less than stellar quality... Mind you, I do have an old CB3000FM base station next to me now that still works. Even reasonable ESR on the original caps still & from appearances it's not a low hour unit. (mind you, it does splatter across about 5 channels lol but then they did from new)
Ah, Brookmans Park Transmitter, it’s changed quite a bit since I worked there in the early 80’s. My first job was to clean 2LO, which was in storage there at the time.
I started in the monitoring hobby all the way back in 1972. Loved it! Even worked all summer to buy a Scanner. But today, very little to listen to. Between Trunked radio, P25, MODAT,(Mobile Data Terminals) and of course ENCRYPTION! There is very little to listen to, even on HF, There you have to deal with ALE. Used to enjoy Rail Road, but they are going NXDN. Guess I still have my Ham Radio.
Not related to wireless, but some friends of mine in Germany in the 1980s took a band picture in a harbour area from the roof of their van. They never knew what there was behind the band that resulted in this, but one evening a week later they got a visit from a security agency demanding the film and all copies of the pictures ;) So sometimes you could attract the "wrong" kind of attention quite quick.
It used to be fun listening to mobile phones when they were analogue. You wouldn't believe the number of people who were having extra marital relationships. Baby alarms and walk about phones were interesting at times too.
My wife went next door to visit our neighbors after we moved in. They were a lesbian couple. She came home to tell me she heard my voice over their police scanner. They had been listening to our cordless phone, which operated on 49 MHz. I quickly purchased one with encryption.
In the ‘90s, I picked up lots of people cheating on their spouses, plus a couple bookies taking bets. Sports gambling was illegal at the time in the US. Now they have apps for it!
tectorama: There are still many people using "cordless phones" which can be received by anyone with the right type of SW Receiver or scanner if they are close enough.
A very interesting story, well told. I reckon he was meant to find the little phone piece, and the slip redirecting his mail. Wanted to scare him into stopping, but it obviously didn't work and they ended up having to pay him a visit anyway. Probably had his phone tapped for ages before they left the bit on the floor for him to find.
That last vignette at 7:50 - there was a similar setup in Washington DC created in the 1980s or '90s. Difference was, the Russians put an "embassy" sign on it and maintained it nicely.
I used to work for a (long defunct) company that built lots of interesting bits n pieces inc. racks of comms listening gear for various agencies, (they were a piece of art, as the quality of assembly was perfect). Looked like the sort of thing that wound up in fake water towers on LOS microwave links to Telecom Tower.
The one on a nuclear power plant site that happened to be directly inline between two towers used for a microwave link across the Irish Sea? I guess someone had to build it!
When you joking with your friend during a telephone conversation and as your gag you say "and to the government agency listening that last part was a joke", then you get the text message from an unknown number that says, "we know!".
I first got into VHF when I was a teen using a Radio Shack patrolman AM/VHF high radio. Mostly listened to ham & police until I discovered a Mobile phone network just outside the 2 meter ham band. Being before cell it was a service that the rich and some businesses used. At night it came alive with drug dealers & pimps, a real world education for me :o)
Many within advisory to government circles have revisited the older rules/legislation pertaining to the listening of restricted radio transmissions being tolerated in most cases, as long as what was heard was not divulged to any other party or parties. They also re-examined the aspect of "records" in relation to any recording of a restricted radio transmission which could (conceivably) be accessed by another, without the authorization of the person who made the recording. This "other party" rule often applies to recorded material, even where or when no such divulging of what was heard had even taken place. So, in essence, the recording medium itself (a tape, a CD or DVD, a computer hard drive or a myriad of other recording mediums) began to fall into the category of "other party or parties". Bear in mind that, as is usually the case, it is usually your criminal practice and civil practice lawyers who dream most of this up, so that it can be reviewed and applied in relation to newer legislation while they bill the government for such advisory and consultation fees.
Back before cell phones went digital a friend bought a trunking scanner. That thing would light up and talk constantly on Friday afternoon with people having affairs meeting after work. There were some voices I recognized. So glad I never bought one. That thing could get you and others in trouble.
Interesting video...I remember listening to the police on the normal FM bands before they were moved to allow more local broadcast stations to develop, remember getting my first scanner in the 80s it was a AoR800e cost £199
Yes, I had memories of listening to the Met on 100MHz FM, on a normal home stereo…was beginning to think I dreamt it, as it was a bizarre frequency choice.
Only a blockhead would choose 100 MHz for a police frequency...😂😂😂. First FM broadcast receivers were 87.5 - 100 MHz (I still have a old tube radio like that). Then it went 87,5 - 104 MHz (already transistor radio at the time...). And finally 87.5 - 108 MHz (for the "western world" of course)
Honestly, the one story that I wish I could remember would be the one about the time a couple kids pissed off the government by finding and listening in on a classified radio frequency using little more than a photo in a PAO release and a formula that was printed in one of their school textbooks. Well, the government couldn't exactly stop publishing PAO releases for legal reasons centered around government accountability and transparency, but you bet your sweet bippy that the formulae for finding radio frequency ranges based off antenna lengths quietly disappeared from textbooks and haven't been published since...
