Police Scanner User's Anyone????

[Wilson513]

Originally Posted by SuperSparkle928

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Quote:"scanners can receive cordless phone broadcasts"

Encryption between the cordless phone and the base station is relatively common. Granted, DECT 6.0 has a somewhat weak algorithm, but you can get cordless phones all over the place (cheaply) that utilize this. I guess if you are willing to put enough effort into listening in, you can do it.

Another option is Frequency-Hopping Digital Spread Spectrum (FHSS). These cordless phones are also really cheap.

I am not too worried about anyone with a scanner being able to listen in.

That is one of the features of the Opto Scout above. Every time your cordless phone switches frequency, my Opto Scout picks up and logs the frequency and switches the AR8000 to the new frequency. Pretty cool huh? Of course I would not use it for phone intercepts, but it sure does work well at a ball game to hear the coaches communicate.

PS: Everyone has digital scanners now, so security requires encryption. Do you have an encrypted phone?

[SuperSparkle928]

Originally Posted by Wilson513

That is one of the features of the Opto Scout above. Every time your cordless phone switches frequency, my Opto Scout picks up and logs the frequency and switches the AR8000 to the new frequency. Pretty cool huh? Of course I would not use it for phone intercepts, but it sure does work well at a ball game to hear the coaches communicate.

PS: Everyone has digital scanners now, so security requires encryption. Do you have an encrypted phone?

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Cool scanner

Yes. I use cordless phones that have DECT 6.0. There are about 5 common manufacturers (well, branded by them) Panasonic, Uniden, AT&T etc.
They are inexpensive. The encryption is not that great, but it works. I used to work for a core networking company that sold telecom equipment to the government. They wanted encryption better than FIPS-140-2. All the hardware and software we made could not be exported out of the country.

Not to get off topic;
One thing we used to do back in the 80's (and it still works today), is that if your scanner or any radio does not have a suppressed local oscillator on the analog receiver portion, then your antenna radiates just a little bit of the LO.
We had (really expensive) spectrum analyzers where I worked, and we could tell is someone had a radio on nearby. What was better, is that we put up an antenna pointing into the parking lot, pointed it at cars, and if they were listening to FM, we could tell what station they were listening to

[Wilson513]

Originally Posted by SuperSparkle928

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Cool scanner

Yes. I use cordless phones that have DECT 6.0. There are about 5 common manufacturers (well, branded by them) Panasonic, Uniden, AT&T etc.
They are inexpensive. The encryption is not that great, but it works. I used to work for a core networking company that sold telecom equipment to the government. They wanted encryption better than FIPS-140-2. All the hardware and software we made could not be exported out of the country.

Not to get off topic;
One thing we used to do back in the 80's (and it still works today), is that if your scanner or any radio does not have a suppressed local oscillator on the analog receiver portion, then your antenna radiates just a little bit of the LO.
We had (really expensive) spectrum analyzers where I worked, and we could tell is someone had a radio on nearby. What was better, is that we put up an antenna pointing into the parking lot, pointed it at cars, and if they were listening to FM, we could tell what station they were listening to

The Optoelectronics Scout receives and logs every radio wave "from DC to Daylight" and so when it is on and linked to the AR8000 (mine came from UK unblocked) it will switch to any frequency. So if you go under a high voltage tower, it will switch the radio to a frequency down in the netherworld. But if the person in the car in front of you picks up the cell phone, like it or not, you are on the call. Thank goodness for digital encrypted cell phones. Back in the day, one had to be quick on the trigger not to improperly intercept every cell phone call in the near field. It was particularly uncomforatable in that often you were looking right at the caller.