I managed to listen in on the security team for a TV shoot once. Most rivetting things being them playing eye-spy with eachother between scenes/takes, and asking what people wanted from the chippy when lunch break came around 🤣
When we found a tracking device attached to my friends car (incorrectly identified as the target person), I used my ham radio to lock onto its frequency (my radio had a function called close call, which was great for picking up nearby radio transmissions and locking onto the frequency, aweseome for piping air traffic comms to bouncers at pubs). Once we had the frequency, we removed the suspect device, removed its batteries and set my home ham station up with a raspberry pi so I could control it from the ipad. Every so often I would drop a 200W carrier on the frequency of the suspect device, then pulll said device out of my back pack, turn it on for about 30 seconds, then rinse and repeat. :) PRobably had the goons completely confused! Considering the device was operating on the 70cm band, I was completely in my right to transmit there, even had the pi drop my callsign in morse!
I once had a job at the local police station in 1980. In the control room they had a scanner looking for illegal CB users. The Home Office had a radio workshop behind the police station. This had spectrum analysers and RACAL receivers linked into tape recorders that would record automatically when a single was detected. The primary interest was on VHF FM frequencies and 27Mhz.
i used to work in one of those HO workshops, we didn''t have any monitoring kit there tho, the spec an's were just for repairing Warc Marconi RC690's and previously the old whitehalls, burndepts be470 etc..
A basic Spectrum Analyzer, with a tunable filter, & a directional antenna will reveal some interesting signals. Yes, many have gone digital in their modulation scheme, but they can still be tracked. Transmissions = breadcrumb trail.
Another great video! 155.750MHz was v busy in the Reading area for ops in clear FM, as were a couple of channels in the 450-451MHz area. About half the time the transmissions were more of a running commentary (not two-way, as per this video). I'm not sure of the purpose of this. I'm trying to remember where I read the following (but I can't!)....One trick to aid visual tracking of a target vehicle at night was to (previously) adhere some clear, light-polarising tape to the car's rear light. An officer in the tail vehicle would look through a contraption with a rotating piece of polarising plastic, and, voilà! The target car is the one with the flashing rear light!
Today, the license number entered into a laptop will produce a radio signal from the vehicle and the vehicle can be seen on the laptop screen, turn-by-turn, represented as an icon. Thus, visual range is not even needed. The monitoring vehicle can stay a kilometer, or two, back and watch every move the vehicle makes. When the vehicle comes to a stop, the monitoring vehicle can just drive right up and make the arrest, or sit back and wait. Another signal from the monitoring vehicle will disable the car completely. This is, of course, if the vehicle is 2010, or newer. This is sad proof that newer is not better, in many circumstances, especially vehicles. At least your vehicle will not be taken far if it is stolen. But, if the governent wants your vehicles disabled, you have nothing you can do about it. My vehicle is so old that an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion will not bother it, nor will intentional electromagnetic pulses deployed without a nuclear weapon can bother it. This fares both very good for me, as well as very poor for me. Granted, I will still be driving with electronic counter measures deployed or a nuclear explosion taking place far enough not to vaporise me. But, I do not have leather interior, power windows, power locks, power seats, power adjust steering, air conditioning, heated and cooling seats, touch screen navigation and sound system, automatic ignition from a tablet or smartphone, Bluetooth connection, fuel injection, variable valve timing, automatic climate control, reactive cruise control, voice command, reverse sensors and screen, antilock brakes. On the positive side, there are some things I am very glad I do not have in my vehicle that are often forced upon new vehicles whether you want them or not. I do not want, automatic interior lights, automatic brake, automatic steer correction, automatic reactive cruise control, automatic headlights, automatic steering assist, automatic brakes, autopilot, emergency brake without warning, automatic auto traction control, touch driving mode selection, touch screen gear select, different driving modes, automatic transmission, tablet dashboard replacing analogue needles and gauges, automatic cylinder deactivation, idiotic automatic stop and start designed in flaw, turbo, electric water pump, electronic power steering, constant variable transmission, front wheel drive, un body, independent suspension, automatic windscreen wipers, variable valve deactivation, Internet, satellite radio, remote satellite tracking, remote engine disable, battery power for fuel, hybrid electric drive, large wheels with thin tyres, nor LED headlights.Those are the things I am very glad I do not have on my old fossil.
This is a cat and mouse game that will never end. Just like when the first two cars lined up for a race. When pandora box is opened it can never be closed.
This brought back some old, but fond memories. Back in the 90s let's just say that the Coast Guard didn't have the vast resources as it did post 9/11 & we used the VHF Marine radios (Icoms that we bought ourselves because the old Motorola's were boat anchors) for land & water surveillance ops and devised our own codes. The USCG is tasked with a variety of law enforcement and regulatory affairs... Leave it to Lewis to keep finding new and interesting topics 👍
My grandfather was a PI back in the 1960s, I remember the stories of him racing around the streets of Glasgow on a tail… found his driving licence booklet on a clear out and he was fined £15 (big money back then) for excessive speed by Lanarkshire police haha
You can get a cheap SDR and run some free software and your fun days of monitoring are back! I use HDSDR running on a RTL-SDR dongle, running some free digital decoder software. You may be able to scan with this set up. But, you can see 4 megahertz of band width at a time and see where the signals are within that span. It is very easy to scroll up the digits and see what is going on. If you see a nice bright signal on the radio scope, click on it and you are listening. You can hear all analogue modes, and all digital modes, if you get the plug-in software! Now I can listen from 100Khz to 1.7Ghz. With a step down converter, I can listen all the way up to around 5 gigahertz. My step down converter is a cheap one and only goes to 3 gigahertz. Go enjoy your monitoring hobby once again! RTL-SDR dongle - £20 SMA to PL259 adaptor - £9 15 metres RG-58a/u cable - £18 Antenna - £0 to $200 depending on what you want. Fun - priceless!
Just based on some other comments: encryption, digital, and trunking are all different things. Any of them can be used singularly, or combined. Believe it or not, there is such a thing as analog encryption. And a vast majority in the us is actually not encrypted. With cellular, there has been a sort of halt on the push for encryption. Every agency has a short code for call by landline or cellular and this is the go to most of the time. There is a push for transparency, and that one is real far as im concerned. Its more likely that there are encrypted portions of these systems, while the majority operate in the clear.
You're kind of right, just because something is digital doesn't mean it's encrypted by default but encryption is very much a baked in part of the 2/3/4/5G standards and for the OTA bit is on by default. 3G OTA encryption was 'broken' a long time ago and a well equipped crypto enthusiast might stand a fighting chance of cracking a recorded 3G datastream but probably not in real time and even then, in the modern world, most cellphones are 4G or 5G which use different/newer encryption schemes. If you're a law enforcement or government agency there's no need to crack it, with the relevant warrants/authority you can 'just' request the carrier provide access at the base station/trunk network. Seem to remember Lewis has at least one video about radios which used analogue encryption and those of us who've been around a while will have bumped into various analogue encryption systems, some of us may even have built voice scrambler/descrambler circuits which were featured in some European electronics magazines and may have been useful against some systems As much as I'd like to be able to listen it's a moronic idea to have law enforcement comms in the clear for 'transparency' because not just 'good guys' have scanners.
Great stuff! I miss the days of really busy non digital, I used to sample lots of snippets of bleeps and cops arresting people and make tunes with them. Now it's dead but I will try having a go with some of those frqs. 🙂👍❤️
What I don't get, in those good days we heard X, Y, and Zee going off, I owned a small home Yupiteru scanner, expensive too at the time,, ssb, am/fm,, it went from over 2 weeks nothing but a ssb and LW receiver and Ham 2, 70, which being licensed was not really much use, but these radios have still held thir value, and they're as busy as ever again with like Owen says, Security in towns, local footie games, apart from encrypted premier league,, David Dukenfield come madly to mind ( jft 96) so I'd recommend if anyone sees a good scanner reasonable to buy it... I'm still not a fan of Netwerk Radio,, too many cheifs and not enough down to earth Indians
Law enforcement in the US has steadily moved towards fully encrypted digital trunking for the last 20 years. Within my metropolitan area, there is still a decent amount of open analogue use, but the content is generally mundane. It's a lot harder to find interesting stuff on the scanner these days.
Another great one Lewis. Call signs like Zero P 1 was actually Oscar Papa 1 for ‘observation post’ or ‘observation point’. All very interesting back in the day around 155Mhz in London
I remember back in the mid 90's visiting Goonhilly Earth Station the size of the dishes was very impressive back then i had a 1.5 meter dish my self in my back garden and was having fun watching TV from all around the world coming from low on the horizon satellites. i remember my very old Icom IC290H was able to go right up there and listen in on a lot of stuff that i had no idea what it was but it was some nail biting stuff on times listening to the cars engines in the back ground screaming "hu hum yes" i enjoyed the video as always keep up the good work cheers and bears from MW5UFO south wales U.K
Oddly enough, I heard what sounded like surveillance on one of the 173MHz frequencies (in FM) just a couple of days before this video was uploaded! On the other side of surveillance, a few years ago a friend of mine heard what sounded like a couple of shoplifters coordinating their activities on one of the default frequencies programmed in the Baofeng BF-888S!!
Long time ago in the Northeast U.S., there was a single mutual aid frequency that the cops in different towns used to talk to each other on the air in case there was say a stolen car passing from one town to another. Every Friday and Saturday night that channel would come alive as the cops took turns pursuing a stolen car as it went from one town to another. What a time
Down here in Louisiana, the old statewide interagency freq was 39.500. Everyone had & used it. and over the course of 25 years the police went from unencrypted analog low band to unencrypted analog High band, to encrypted analog UHF to the Trunked Motorola LTR in the 7-800mhz spectrum. And that's where Fire went too ... Can't even hear the one-way tone out dispatch anymore. The local sheriff for some reason left jail comms at unencrypted VHF High analog. But that's less interesting than the local hospital security and maintenance. We DO still have the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway bridge (24 miles long) patrol on UHF analog unencrypted and can hear the toll booth staff calling the patrol about people run the toll booths. It's $5 for passenger cars + up to $30 for 18 wheelers. About a dozen or so people a day run the toll, and they catch about half
Thanks again for another interesting video, Lewis 👍🏼 Some of those 449 frequencies are active in my area, difficult to ID exactly what they are but from the content I’m almost certain one is being used by a local store or supermarket. Another seems to be a school or college.
Remember a local amateur telling me some great stories from back in his young adult days. He was in his primacy when scanners were still pretty niche amongst even radio amateurs and had managed to import one from the states that could search. He managed to find the local PR UHF channels and later on was scanning around and stumbled upon a local CID operation around the corner running an OP. Being an avid constructor and not wanting to loose his scanner when out and about, he made himself a 2 little crystal receivers, one on the output and the other on the input of the local divisional channel. Packaged it nicely in a small box with volume controls and headphone connection. Used to take that out and about and listen all the time. He was a regular contributor to PROMA back in the day too, had a lot of good information and through different contacts had found unpublished stuff. Year later after GMP switched over to airwave, I came across a couple of Philips PR’s. It’s amazing how accurate peoples lists were!
These and Shop Watch channels could be a nice replacement to the listening fun since Police Airwave can no longer be monitored. Thank you for posting the frequency list!
I’ve put them frequencies in my rig I use to monitor PMR in my area and at least 3 are being used not sure who they are yet but I think one is a school, keep the videos coming great channel, atb John.
Back in the 70s and 80s in a small town in Pennsylvania my grandfather used to listen to his Bearcat scanner all the time. No point in that nowadays unfortunately.
I miss the days of analogue mobile phones. My scanner in the Medway towns (1995) seemed to home unerringly onto the phone conversations of cheating couples and drug dealers. Move a bit closer to London and (what I assumed to be) dealers used their own analogue encryption - Caribbean patois. A bit like those Navajo 'code talkers' in the US Army WW2. Pretty much unintelligible to most people.
Douglas Adams, the author of the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy stated: "an infinite number of monkey's with an infinite number of typewriters, will one day come up with the complete works of Shakespeare ".... will Tetra ever get hacked, I wonder?
If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel. Arthur Eddington (1928). Eddington was commenting on something Émile Borel wrote in 1913. The concept can be traced back to Aristotle, (b 384 BC) but probably didn't involve actual typewriters.
TETRA has been cracked. The Airwave wrapper used in the UK hasn't but TETRA was cracked years ago with a pre-compiled bootable DVD full of tools to let you listen to it using a simple RTL SDR, from a Dutch developer, although I'm fairly sure it's significantly better than it was 7-8 years ago when I was last using it.
@@dennis8196 I think you’re referring to TETRA being decoded and the tool was developed by Curli-boi I believe. Has TEA encryption been hacked, maybe. But if it has, it won’t be in the public domain for some time yet.
Hi Lewis. You mentioned Customs & Excise. In the late 80s early 90s I’m pretty sure their Manchester operation was based at Salford Docks. Just like the operation in your video, the repeater was on permanent talk-through, the output frequency was “interesting” for such sensitive surveillance at roughly 76.7MHz so all you needed was a domestic FM radio, some tuned down that far without even needing an oscillator tweak. The base operator was always a female using the call “Magpie Oscar” and the field agents used Magpie +2 digits, Later there was an ITV series “The Knock” which got a lot of the radio procedure and surveillance techniques correct, but nowhere near as exciting as the real thing. Perhaps the producers had been listening too ;-)
Damn, What An Interesting Video. I Myself Got Some Frequencies In My Area, Main Police Station, CCTV Camera Operators And Others .. Interesting To Listen In.
Strathclyde Police CID used to use 143MHz simplex, up in Glasgow - for doing drug surveillance. They used to give the street names out, then changed over to just the initials of the streets afterwards. I guess the dealers listening to the scanners soon sussed out where they were...
Most areas use analog or digital Trunked Radio systems these days. you can still easily listen in on Trunked Radio with an SDR (software defined radio), as long as the channels are not encrypted, and most aren't.
Ironic how "ENEMY OF THE STATE" movie is like a early Bond fim with gadgets readily available at online stores.. Great vid as usual, regards to Roger, hope his therapy is working, and your not hearing "5watt,,, 8watt, ctcss 107.5,,, rather than, Thanks for coming,,, 10/10,,, 😭®️😂,,, great vid
Many years ago, the dept store owner in question actually walked past me with his heavies making a bubble around him. It really wasn't necessary as almost nobody knew who it was. He seemed to think that the royals were going to have him whacked by some sort of real life James Bond figure for his crazy assertions about them.
Sounds like the babblings of DWP after disability claimants but more likely council enforcement after dog walkers who don't pick up after their pets 🐅 💩 💩 Great analogue memories Lewis
That's is still a local firm offering training in close protection and vehicular surveillance in the North East. They were until a year or so ago still using VHF analogue channels but haven't heard them for a bit due to idiots keying over them and giving commentary on their channels.
Great video Lewis....sadly the bands have changed so we now need to adapt the best we can.... some good stuff is still there but like a fished out ocean or pond so we need patience... timing...and close call with digital recording for when we are away from the shack or car ...so the devices like opto scout still have a use x
Im currently listening to chatter on the 449.400 frequency although its very quiet and full of static so whoever im listening to must be a fair distance. Been hearing them a few days now.
I will disappoint you but any time i program radios for agencies or any other similar jobs we use AES encryption on DMR and it's virtually impossible to hear without having the pre shared key.
Very interesting to see what goes on in the UK. While here in the US, we don't have Tetra, many Police and other US government, Federal, species are not only digital, but also encrypted, making monitoring difficult.
No Tetra in wide use. Some private business use here & there. We've got P-25, and Motorola LTR/Trunking & most of that is encrypted. To the best of my knowledge, the National Park Service (Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Canyon.....) & National Forest Service are of the very few federal agencies who don't use a digital or encrypted system for routine everyday use. I don't know what Amtrak (they're "feds" but go to length to disavow it) or the other RRs are up to ? They're allocated hundreds of freqs above 165 through 174mhz. Maybe there's an American RR buff in here who can say ? In south Louisiana I grew up listening to the local public safety back when everyone was VHF Low (38-39 MHz - I still remember them all 39.30 State Police, 39.72 Sheriff, 39.16 City Police, 39.50 Interagency etc) then they migrated to VHF High analog, then to UHF analog. Then to LTR trunking & then to 700-800mhz...which left only the Fire Depts to monitor. Then they were "coopted" and moved to the 700-800
@@baronedipiemonte3990 TETRA Airwave is more useful in urban environments with dense cellular repeater installation since it uses the cellular network for trunking. The Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, which established Amtrak, specifically states that, "The Corporation will not be an agency or establishment of the United States Government". Not reading too deeply into that, that's not a disavowment, that's a statement of intent that it does not answer to the Federal Government in exchange for funding.
The old Regional Crime Squads were great, and there was plenty of action back in the 80's and 90's. I once heard activity that sounded very local and realised they were watching a bloke that lived no more than about 50 yards away.
We had similar in south east essex uk ...one quite night listening to the police ....the channel burst in to life.. a local bar that was under observation for drug dealing from a disused building opposite filmed a man run out of the target bar and throw a rock through the window they were observing and filming out of!....well the observation team shouted for back up for them to be extracted out of the rear entrance while police officers distracted the gathering crowd at the front Someone knew they were there Not much on the bands these days so sad
Yaesu VX-5R is a cracking bit of kit, same size as the UV-5R but the scan function is WAY faster and it's a lot easier to unlock the receive mode from bands 5 through 9 (300kHz-1GHz) gapless. The downside to it is you can't get high capacity batteries for it, you get one size and I'm guessing that's to preserve the integrity of the weather seal - yup, the damn thing's waterPROOF.
This would all be totally illegal in Canada, without a Judicial warrant, and those are pretty rare. As I did Signals Intelligence for 25 years, I well know this, and the restrictions against listening to Canadians anywhere, or anyone transmitting/receiving to/from Canada. There is no "big brother" watching people here! As I now work with the RCMP, I know they haven't the equipment, nor manpower to do this either, at least not where I live.
As it happens here in Saskatchewan. We have the right to do with the airwaves where you live . As long as you do not interfere with them. And if you find anything out while doing so do not tell more than two other people about it . In the 80s around home we all watched HBO . It was a way to sell more TV sets. You paid money or bought a new set. And they told you what channels they were rebroadcast on . It was great.
Here in the UK now any man and his dog can get a HMGov warrant for anything from arresting an aggressive parrot to bugging fish tanks against Gold Fish abuse
Fun to listen on PMR, we went on a family holiday to Scotland a few years ago (11 of us) so I took a set of PMR handsets for the kids and parents to play with, found out the Scottish fishermen in the loch were also using PMR and their language was decidedly NSFW :)
DMR ( MOTO TURBO ) IS HEAVILY USED BY CITIES AND BUSINESS FOR SINGLE CHANNEL TRUNKING SINGLE CHANNEL TRUNKING DMR IS SIMPLEX WHERE THE RADIOS ARE IN DMR MODE THE RADIOS ID AND ALL THE NETWORK INFORMATION IS TRANSMITTED EACH TIME BY EACH RADIO IN DMR DMR USES A COLOR CODE ( CC ) TIER ( TS ) ( TIME SLOT ) GROUP ID ( TGID ) USUALLY THEY ARE ON UHF 450 TO 520 MHZ. BUT HAVE BEEN SEEN IN THE 350 TO 420 RANGE AND THE 150 TO 174 RANGE IN THE US A LOT OF UNLICENSED BUSINESS AND PERSONAL USERS ARE USING THE 350 TO 400 BAND, SINCE IT IS CLEAR AND IS FOR US MILITARY AND RARELY IS THERE EVER ANY SIGNALS IN THIS BAND FROM THE MILITARY THE MILITARY IN THE US ADOPTED A NORTH AMERICA WAN TRUNKED DIGITAL SYSTEM ABOUT 30 YEARS AGO IN THE 400 TO 420 MHZ RANGE IT ALSO IS TRUNKED WITH SPECIFIC FREQUENCIES FROM EACH BASE LEAVING MOST OF THE BAND OPEN AND UNUSED THE 220 TO 230 MHZ BAND IS USED FOR DIGITAL DATA, RAILROADS LOW POWER SYSTEMS AND FEDEX , UPS, AND OTHER COMPANIES WITH A WAN USE THIS BAND IF YOU LOOK IN THE BAND YOU WILL SEE THESE HUGE SIGNALS THAT ARE THE FEDEX AND UPS FLEETS THAT ARE CONSTANTLY SENDING THE SCANNER DATA TO THE MAINFRAME COMPUTERS WITH TRACKING INFORMATION OF THE PACKAGES AND THE TRUCKS EACH TRUCK HAS A CRADLE FOR THE HANDHELD SCANNER AND THEY PUT THE HANDHELD UNIT INTO THE CRADLE AND IT STARTS CHARGING, AND DOWNLOADS ALL THE RECENT DATA AND TRANSMITTS IT USING A 220 MHZ RADIO AND AN ANTENNA ON THE TRUCK USUALLY THE ANTENNAS ARE SMALL AND THEY ARE NOT EASY TO SEE THE 70 MHZ CB BAND IN THE UK IS A DATA BAND IN AMERICA THEY HAVE TELEMETRY AND OTHER SCIENTIFIC DATA LINKS IN THAT BAND IT'S ALSO WHERE CHANNEL TV 4 & 5 IS
I managed to listen in on the security team for a TV shoot once.
Most rivetting things being them playing eye-spy with eachother between scenes/takes, and asking what people wanted from the chippy when lunch break came around 🤣
When we found a tracking device attached to my friends car (incorrectly identified as the target person), I used my ham radio to lock onto its frequency (my radio had a function called close call, which was great for picking up nearby radio transmissions and locking onto the frequency, aweseome for piping air traffic comms to bouncers at pubs). Once we had the frequency, we removed the suspect device, removed its batteries and set my home ham station up with a raspberry pi so I could control it from the ipad. Every so often I would drop a 200W carrier on the frequency of the suspect device, then pulll said device out of my back pack, turn it on for about 30 seconds, then rinse and repeat. :) PRobably had the goons completely confused! Considering the device was operating on the 70cm band, I was completely in my right to transmit there, even had the pi drop my callsign in morse!
I don't quite follow your story. What was the point of remotely keying the transmitter at home?
Awesome, good for you!
@@david672orford to fuck with the people who played the transmitter
I once had a job at the local police station in 1980. In the control room they had a scanner looking for illegal CB users. The Home Office had a radio workshop behind the police station. This had spectrum analysers and RACAL receivers linked into tape recorders that would record automatically when a single was detected. The primary interest was on VHF FM frequencies and 27Mhz.
i used to work in one of those HO workshops, we didn''t have any monitoring kit there tho, the spec an's were just for repairing Warc Marconi RC690's and previously the old whitehalls, burndepts be470 etc..
What even could be "illegal" CB use, if CB needs absolutely no licensing ?
@@pteppig Back In The 80's A New License Had To Be Purchased From The Post Office Annually
@@pteppig Governments love's their taxes, not so much it's citizens.
@@pteppig No licence required doesn't mean you can use whatever power, frequency or mode you want.
A basic Spectrum Analyzer, with a tunable filter, & a directional antenna will reveal some interesting signals. Yes, many have gone digital in their modulation scheme, but they can still be tracked. Transmissions = breadcrumb trail.
Another great video! 155.750MHz was v busy in the Reading area for ops in clear FM, as were a couple of channels in the 450-451MHz area. About half the time the transmissions were more of a running commentary (not two-way, as per this video). I'm not sure of the purpose of this. I'm trying to remember where I read the following (but I can't!)....One trick to aid visual tracking of a target vehicle at night was to (previously) adhere some clear, light-polarising tape to the car's rear light. An officer in the tail vehicle would look through a contraption with a rotating piece of polarising plastic, and, voilà! The target car is the one with the flashing rear light!
Today, the license number entered into a laptop will produce a radio signal from the vehicle and the vehicle can be seen on the laptop screen, turn-by-turn, represented as an icon. Thus, visual range is not even needed. The monitoring vehicle can stay a kilometer, or two, back and watch every move the vehicle makes. When the vehicle comes to a stop, the monitoring vehicle can just drive right up and make the arrest, or sit back and wait. Another signal from the monitoring vehicle will disable the car completely. This is, of course, if the vehicle is 2010, or newer. This is sad proof that newer is not better, in many circumstances, especially vehicles. At least your vehicle will not be taken far if it is stolen. But, if the governent wants your vehicles disabled, you have nothing you can do about it. My vehicle is so old that an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion will not bother it, nor will intentional electromagnetic pulses deployed without a nuclear weapon can bother it. This fares both very good for me, as well as very poor for me. Granted, I will still be driving with electronic counter measures deployed or a nuclear explosion taking place far enough not to vaporise me. But, I do not have leather interior, power windows, power locks, power seats, power adjust steering, air conditioning, heated and cooling seats, touch screen navigation and sound system, automatic ignition from a tablet or smartphone, Bluetooth connection, fuel injection, variable valve timing, automatic climate control, reactive cruise control, voice command, reverse sensors and screen, antilock brakes.
On the positive side, there are some things I am very glad I do not have in my vehicle that are often forced upon new vehicles whether you want them or not. I do not want, automatic interior lights, automatic brake, automatic steer correction, automatic reactive cruise control, automatic headlights, automatic steering assist, automatic brakes, autopilot, emergency brake without warning, automatic auto traction control, touch driving mode selection, touch screen gear select, different driving modes, automatic transmission, tablet dashboard replacing analogue needles and gauges, automatic cylinder deactivation, idiotic automatic stop and start designed in flaw, turbo, electric water pump, electronic power steering, constant variable transmission, front wheel drive, un body, independent suspension, automatic windscreen wipers, variable valve deactivation, Internet, satellite radio, remote satellite tracking, remote engine disable, battery power for fuel, hybrid electric drive, large wheels with thin tyres, nor LED headlights.Those are the things I am very glad I do not have on my old fossil.
This is a cat and mouse game that will never end. Just like when the first two cars lined up for a race. When pandora box is opened it can never be closed.
This brought back some old, but fond memories. Back in the 90s let's just say that the Coast Guard didn't have the vast resources as it did post 9/11 & we used the VHF Marine radios (Icoms that we bought ourselves because the old Motorola's were boat anchors) for land & water surveillance ops and devised our own codes. The USCG is tasked with a variety of law enforcement and regulatory affairs... Leave it to Lewis to keep finding new and interesting topics 👍
Sadly everything in the surrounds of Vancouver from Fire to Police are now encrypted P25
My grandfather was a PI back in the 1960s, I remember the stories of him racing around the streets of Glasgow on a tail… found his driving licence booklet on a clear out and he was fined £15 (big money back then) for excessive speed by Lanarkshire police haha
18 mins from a release that's the closest iv been to when you have released a video .
Love the content keep up the good work . 😀
Third comment.
I miss the analogue days. Radio scanners were very interesting back in the day especially the mobile phone conversations 😂
You can get a cheap SDR and run some free software and your fun days of monitoring are back! I use HDSDR running on a RTL-SDR dongle, running some free digital decoder software. You may be able to scan with this set up. But, you can see 4 megahertz of band width at a time and see where the signals are within that span. It is very easy to scroll up the digits and see what is going on. If you see a nice bright signal on the radio scope, click on it and you are listening. You can hear all analogue modes, and all digital modes, if you get the plug-in software! Now I can listen from 100Khz to 1.7Ghz. With a step down converter, I can listen all the way up to around 5 gigahertz. My step down converter is a cheap one and only goes to 3 gigahertz. Go enjoy your monitoring hobby once again!
RTL-SDR dongle - £20
SMA to PL259 adaptor - £9
15 metres RG-58a/u cable - £18
Antenna - £0 to $200 depending on what you want.
Fun - priceless!
Just based on some other comments: encryption, digital, and trunking are all different things. Any of them can be used singularly, or combined. Believe it or not, there is such a thing as analog encryption. And a vast majority in the us is actually not encrypted. With cellular, there has been a sort of halt on the push for encryption. Every agency has a short code for call by landline or cellular and this is the go to most of the time. There is a push for transparency, and that one is real far as im concerned. Its more likely that there are encrypted portions of these systems, while the majority operate in the clear.
Kevin mitnik would had them all in tears
You're kind of right, just because something is digital doesn't mean it's encrypted by default but encryption is very much a baked in part of the 2/3/4/5G standards and for the OTA bit is on by default.
3G OTA encryption was 'broken' a long time ago and a well equipped crypto enthusiast might stand a fighting chance of cracking a recorded 3G datastream but probably not in real time and even then, in the modern world, most cellphones are 4G or 5G which use different/newer encryption schemes.
If you're a law enforcement or government agency there's no need to crack it, with the relevant warrants/authority you can 'just' request the carrier provide access at the base station/trunk network.
Seem to remember Lewis has at least one video about radios which used analogue encryption and those of us who've been around a while will have bumped into various analogue encryption systems, some of us may even have built voice scrambler/descrambler circuits which were featured in some European electronics magazines and may have been useful against some systems
As much as I'd like to be able to listen it's a moronic idea to have law enforcement comms in the clear for 'transparency' because not just 'good guys' have scanners.
Great stuff! I miss the days of really busy non digital, I used to sample lots of snippets of bleeps and cops arresting people and make tunes with them. Now it's dead but I will try having a go with some of those frqs. 🙂👍❤️
What I don't get, in those good days we heard X, Y, and Zee going off, I owned a small home Yupiteru scanner, expensive too at the time,, ssb, am/fm,, it went from over 2 weeks nothing but a ssb and LW receiver and Ham 2, 70, which being licensed was not really much use, but these radios have still held thir value, and they're as busy as ever again with like Owen says, Security in towns, local footie games, apart from encrypted premier league,, David Dukenfield come madly to mind ( jft 96) so I'd recommend if anyone sees a good scanner reasonable to buy it... I'm still not a fan of Netwerk Radio,, too many cheifs and not enough down to earth Indians
Law enforcement in the US has steadily moved towards fully encrypted digital trunking for the last 20 years. Within my metropolitan area, there is still a decent amount of open analogue use, but the content is generally mundane. It's a lot harder to find interesting stuff on the scanner these days.
@@TMS5100 Lucky!
Another great one Lewis. Call signs like Zero P 1 was actually Oscar Papa 1 for ‘observation post’ or ‘observation point’. All very interesting back in the day around 155Mhz in London
Good luck monitoring us, we have all moved to network radios. Unlimited range and crystal clear comms 👍🏻
I remember back in the mid 90's visiting Goonhilly Earth Station the size of the dishes was very impressive back then i had a 1.5 meter dish my self in my back garden and was having fun watching TV from all around the world coming from low on the horizon satellites. i remember my very old Icom IC290H was able to go right up there and listen in on a lot of stuff that i had no idea what it was but it was some nail biting stuff on times listening to the cars engines in the back ground screaming "hu hum yes" i enjoyed the video as always keep up the good work cheers and bears from MW5UFO south wales U.K
Top notch content as always👍
Interesting video 👍🏻 the music 🎵 at the end of the video always makes me want to jump up and bop around.... and I am 70 😮🤔😎😂😂😂
Oddly enough, I heard what sounded like surveillance on one of the 173MHz frequencies (in FM) just a couple of days before this video was uploaded! On the other side of surveillance, a few years ago a friend of mine heard what sounded like a couple of shoplifters coordinating their activities on one of the default frequencies programmed in the Baofeng BF-888S!!
Long time ago in the Northeast U.S., there was a single mutual aid frequency that the cops in different towns used to talk to each other on the air in case there was say a stolen car passing from one town to another. Every Friday and Saturday night that channel would come alive as the cops took turns pursuing a stolen car as it went from one town to another. What a time
CSPERN?
@@UltimateDoomer1 SPEN (State Police Emergency Network)
Down here in Louisiana, the old statewide interagency freq was 39.500. Everyone had & used it. and over the course of 25 years the police went from unencrypted analog low band to unencrypted analog High band, to encrypted analog UHF to the Trunked Motorola LTR in the 7-800mhz spectrum. And that's where Fire went too ... Can't even hear the one-way tone out dispatch anymore. The local sheriff for some reason left jail comms at unencrypted VHF High analog. But that's less interesting than the local hospital security and maintenance. We DO still have the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway bridge (24 miles long) patrol on UHF analog unencrypted and can hear the toll booth staff calling the patrol about people run the toll booths. It's $5 for passenger cars + up to $30 for 18 wheelers. About a dozen or so people a day run the toll, and they catch about half
Those are usually county-specific. The one in my county is called FAPERN, and they have one for VHF and UHF.
Thanks again for another interesting video, Lewis 👍🏼
Some of those 449 frequencies are active in my area, difficult to ID exactly what they are but from the content I’m almost certain one is being used by a local store or supermarket. Another seems to be a school or college.
Remember a local amateur telling me some great stories from back in his young adult days. He was in his primacy when scanners were still pretty niche amongst even radio amateurs and had managed to import one from the states that could search.
He managed to find the local PR UHF channels and later on was scanning around and stumbled upon a local CID operation around the corner running an OP.
Being an avid constructor and not wanting to loose his scanner when out and about, he made himself a 2 little crystal receivers, one on the output and the other on the input of the local divisional channel. Packaged it nicely in a small box with volume controls and headphone connection. Used to take that out and about and listen all the time.
He was a regular contributor to PROMA back in the day too, had a lot of good information and through different contacts had found unpublished stuff.
Year later after GMP switched over to airwave, I came across a couple of Philips PR’s. It’s amazing how accurate peoples lists were!
These and Shop Watch channels could be a nice replacement to the listening fun since Police Airwave can no longer be monitored. Thank you for posting the frequency list!
The music at the end is really jarring after fairly quite speech. Love the content!
Love the scanning vids Lewis , keep up the great work buddy 😁
I’ve put them frequencies in my rig I use to monitor PMR in my area and at least 3 are being used not sure who they are yet but I think one is a school, keep the videos coming great channel, atb John.
Back in the 70s and 80s in a small town in Pennsylvania my grandfather used to listen to his Bearcat scanner all the time. No point in that nowadays unfortunately.
My old employer went from mini-cab style with fist mike to using mobile phone and mobile data.
Back before they went digital we and my girlfriend would spend all Saturday evening listening to the scanner very interesting and a laugh
Great Vid Our Kid
Bless Up
I miss the days of analogue mobile phones. My scanner in the Medway towns (1995) seemed to home unerringly onto the phone conversations of cheating couples and drug dealers. Move a bit closer to London and (what I assumed to be) dealers used their own analogue encryption - Caribbean patois. A bit like those Navajo 'code talkers' in the US Army WW2. Pretty much unintelligible to most people.
Douglas Adams, the author of the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy stated: "an infinite number of monkey's with an infinite number of typewriters, will one day come up with the complete works of Shakespeare ".... will Tetra ever get hacked, I wonder?
All encryption gets hacked at some time. Tetra has probably already been hacked. It's just not known by whom.
If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel.
Arthur Eddington (1928).
Eddington was commenting on something Émile Borel wrote in 1913.
The concept can be traced back to Aristotle, (b 384 BC) but probably didn't involve actual typewriters.
TETRA has been cracked. The Airwave wrapper used in the UK hasn't but TETRA was cracked years ago with a pre-compiled bootable DVD full of tools to let you listen to it using a simple RTL SDR, from a Dutch developer, although I'm fairly sure it's significantly better than it was 7-8 years ago when I was last using it.
@@dennis8196 I think you’re referring to TETRA being decoded and the tool was developed by Curli-boi I believe. Has TEA encryption been hacked, maybe. But if it has, it won’t be in the public domain for some time yet.
Hi Lewis.
You mentioned Customs & Excise. In the late 80s early 90s I’m pretty sure their Manchester operation was based at Salford Docks. Just like the operation in your video, the repeater was on permanent talk-through, the output frequency was “interesting” for such sensitive surveillance at roughly 76.7MHz so all you needed was a domestic FM radio, some tuned down that far without even needing an oscillator tweak.
The base operator was always a female using the call “Magpie Oscar” and the field agents used Magpie +2 digits,
Later there was an ITV series “The Knock” which got a lot of the radio procedure and surveillance techniques correct, but nowhere near as exciting as the real thing. Perhaps the producers had been listening too ;-)
Hey mate thanks for the info. Drop me an email! Ringwaymanchester@mail.com would love to discuss this more.
Damn, What An Interesting Video.
I Myself Got Some Frequencies In My Area, Main Police Station, CCTV Camera Operators And Others .. Interesting To Listen In.
Strathclyde Police CID used to use 143MHz simplex, up in Glasgow - for doing drug surveillance. They used to give the street names out, then changed over to just the initials of the streets afterwards. I guess the dealers listening to the scanners soon sussed out where they were...
Sadly here most state owned agencies are using encrypted p.25
However private entities like shopping mall security it’s just plain dmr
Most areas use analog or digital Trunked Radio systems these days. you can still easily listen in on Trunked Radio with an SDR (software defined radio), as long as the channels are not encrypted, and most aren't.
Ironic how "ENEMY OF THE STATE" movie is like a early Bond fim with gadgets readily available at online stores.. Great vid as usual, regards to Roger, hope his therapy is working, and your not hearing "5watt,,, 8watt, ctcss 107.5,,, rather than, Thanks for coming,,, 10/10,,, 😭®️😂,,, great vid
Many years ago, the dept store owner in question actually walked past me with his heavies making a bubble around him. It really wasn't necessary as almost nobody knew who it was. He seemed to think that the royals were going to have him whacked by some sort of real life James Bond figure for his crazy assertions about them.
here in the US they got wise to this and most times all use PTT nexttel or the like now.
Another cracking video review
Sounds like the babblings of DWP after disability claimants but more likely council enforcement after dog walkers who don't pick up after their pets 🐅 💩 💩
Great analogue memories Lewis
Isn't sad!
Military encryption for the protection of civilization has now become eyes against the poor. Bring on 1984.
very interesting lewis yet another great video
Everyone is digital now.
Use to love listening in to Trafford Centre security on my V5 ,but all gone digital now .
That's is still a local firm offering training in close protection and vehicular surveillance in the North East. They were until a year or so ago still using VHF analogue channels but haven't heard them for a bit due to idiots keying over them and giving commentary on their channels.
Great video Lewis....sadly the bands have changed so we now need to adapt the best we can.... some good stuff is still there but like a fished out ocean or pond so we need patience... timing...and close call with digital recording for when we are away from the shack or car ...so the devices like opto scout still have a use x
Im currently listening to chatter on the 449.400 frequency although its very quiet and full of static so whoever im listening to must be a fair distance. Been hearing them a few days now.
I will disappoint you but any time i program radios for agencies or any other similar jobs we use AES encryption on DMR and it's virtually impossible to hear without having the pre shared key.
I have hears Federal agents using our statewide comm system. And it sounds like you showed here.
Thanks Lewis
0:38, did anybody ever play The Getaway on PS2? It was a cop/mob/criminal game set in england and the audio sounds just like the game lol
Nice video
can these be monitored using SDR?
Very interesting to see what goes on in the
UK. While here in the US, we don't have Tetra,
many Police and other US government, Federal, species are not only digital, but
also encrypted, making monitoring difficult.
No Tetra in wide use. Some private business use here & there. We've got P-25, and Motorola LTR/Trunking & most of that is encrypted. To the best of my knowledge, the National Park Service (Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Canyon.....) & National Forest Service are of the very few federal agencies who don't use a digital or encrypted system for routine everyday use. I don't know what Amtrak (they're "feds" but go to length to disavow it) or the other RRs are up to ? They're allocated hundreds of freqs above 165 through 174mhz. Maybe there's an American RR buff in here who can say ? In south Louisiana I grew up listening to the local public safety back when everyone was VHF Low (38-39 MHz - I still remember them all 39.30 State Police, 39.72 Sheriff, 39.16 City Police, 39.50 Interagency etc) then they migrated to VHF High analog, then to UHF analog. Then to LTR trunking & then to 700-800mhz...which left only the Fire Depts to monitor. Then they were "coopted" and moved to the 700-800
@@baronedipiemonte3990 TETRA Airwave is more useful in urban environments with dense cellular repeater installation since it uses the cellular network for trunking. The Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, which established Amtrak, specifically states that, "The Corporation will not be an agency or establishment of the United States Government". Not reading too deeply into that, that's not a disavowment, that's a statement of intent that it does not answer to the Federal Government in exchange for funding.
The old Regional Crime Squads were great, and there was plenty of action back in the 80's and 90's. I once heard activity that sounded very local and realised they were watching a bloke that lived no more than about 50 yards away.
@@Hiram8866 Yes, same here.
We had similar in south east essex uk ...one quite night listening to the police ....the channel burst in to life.. a local bar that was under observation for drug dealing from a disused building opposite filmed a man run out of the target bar and throw a rock through the window they were observing and filming out of!....well the observation team shouted for back up for them to be extracted out of the rear entrance while police officers distracted the gathering crowd at the front
Someone knew they were there
Not much on the bands these days so sad
And why is it illegal if citizens want CB comms access ?
Any one have a good recommendation for a quick cheap scanner? My UV5R is not quick.
Yaesu VX-5R is a cracking bit of kit, same size as the UV-5R but the scan function is WAY faster and it's a lot easier to unlock the receive mode from bands 5 through 9 (300kHz-1GHz) gapless. The downside to it is you can't get high capacity batteries for it, you get one size and I'm guessing that's to preserve the integrity of the weather seal - yup, the damn thing's waterPROOF.
@Pete Testube I'm not going to post that information here, but I will say it involves a partial stripdown and a poke with a soldering iron.
This would all be totally illegal in Canada, without a Judicial warrant, and those are pretty rare. As I did Signals Intelligence for 25 years, I well know this, and the restrictions against listening to Canadians anywhere, or anyone transmitting/receiving to/from Canada. There is no "big brother" watching people here! As I now work with the RCMP, I know they haven't the equipment, nor manpower to do this either, at least not where I live.
As it happens here in Saskatchewan. We have the right to do with the airwaves where you live . As long as you do not interfere with them. And if you find anything out while doing so do not tell more than two other people about it . In the 80s around home we all watched HBO . It was a way to sell more TV sets. You paid money or bought a new set. And they told you what channels they were rebroadcast on . It was great.
Here in the UK now any man and his dog can get a HMGov warrant for anything from arresting an aggressive parrot to bugging fish tanks against Gold Fish abuse
Scanning is dead. Good video anyway.
Heard the bikers out with the instructor the other day on PMR.
yep, a lot of instructors use PMR, the one I got my CBT with used a digital UHF system where we had receivers, he had a transmitter on VOX.
Fun to listen on PMR, we went on a family holiday to Scotland a few years ago (11 of us) so I took a set of PMR handsets for the kids and parents to play with, found out the Scottish fishermen in the loch were also using PMR and their language was decidedly NSFW :)
I live next to the Russian embassy :)
No one here broadcasts unencrypted radio and hasn't for 20 years.
Good to know u have so little crime in uk that these jobsworths can creep around
When did benefits fraud, shoplifting etc. stop being a criminal offence?
The day we discovered that the PM and his ministers were liars and had their fingers in the Till.
Definitely local law enforcement and not national. Radio codes and procedures are all wrong for national ops.
Don't hear these guys much these days and far and few between when you could
👍
The Alinco djx2000 has the best receive on HF and VHF of all the receivers i have ever owned
Aother good video Lewis thanks. G0STE
DMR ( MOTO TURBO ) IS HEAVILY USED BY CITIES AND BUSINESS FOR SINGLE CHANNEL TRUNKING
SINGLE CHANNEL TRUNKING DMR IS SIMPLEX WHERE THE RADIOS ARE IN DMR MODE
THE RADIOS ID AND ALL THE NETWORK INFORMATION IS TRANSMITTED EACH TIME BY EACH RADIO IN DMR
DMR USES A
COLOR CODE ( CC )
TIER ( TS ) ( TIME SLOT )
GROUP ID ( TGID )
USUALLY THEY ARE ON UHF 450 TO 520 MHZ. BUT HAVE BEEN SEEN IN THE 350 TO 420 RANGE AND THE 150 TO 174 RANGE
IN THE US A LOT OF UNLICENSED BUSINESS AND PERSONAL USERS ARE USING THE 350 TO 400 BAND, SINCE IT IS CLEAR AND IS FOR US MILITARY AND RARELY IS THERE EVER ANY SIGNALS IN THIS BAND FROM THE MILITARY
THE MILITARY IN THE US ADOPTED A NORTH AMERICA WAN TRUNKED DIGITAL SYSTEM ABOUT 30 YEARS AGO IN THE 400 TO 420 MHZ RANGE
IT ALSO IS TRUNKED WITH SPECIFIC FREQUENCIES FROM EACH BASE LEAVING MOST OF THE BAND OPEN AND UNUSED
THE 220 TO 230 MHZ BAND IS USED FOR DIGITAL DATA, RAILROADS LOW POWER SYSTEMS AND FEDEX , UPS, AND OTHER COMPANIES WITH A WAN USE THIS BAND
IF YOU LOOK IN THE BAND YOU WILL SEE THESE HUGE SIGNALS THAT ARE THE FEDEX AND UPS FLEETS THAT ARE CONSTANTLY SENDING THE SCANNER DATA TO THE MAINFRAME COMPUTERS WITH TRACKING INFORMATION OF THE PACKAGES AND THE TRUCKS
EACH TRUCK HAS A CRADLE FOR THE HANDHELD SCANNER AND THEY PUT THE HANDHELD UNIT INTO THE CRADLE AND IT STARTS CHARGING, AND DOWNLOADS ALL THE RECENT DATA AND TRANSMITTS IT USING A 220 MHZ RADIO AND AN ANTENNA ON THE TRUCK
USUALLY THE ANTENNAS ARE SMALL AND THEY ARE NOT EASY TO SEE
THE 70 MHZ CB BAND IN THE UK IS A DATA BAND IN AMERICA
THEY HAVE TELEMETRY AND OTHER SCIENTIFIC DATA LINKS IN THAT BAND
IT'S ALSO WHERE CHANNEL TV 4 & 5 IS