At least your soldiers have good taste...

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Jay911

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Looking at a video shared with me from a documentary being filmed of US troops in the middle east taking fire from snipers. At one point they have personnel listening in to the enemy comms. One guy is seen tuning the device he's presumably using to listen in with:

AgJyrrD.png


Got the right antenna on there too!
 

N9PBD

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Jay,

For some reason, I can't see the link or photo in your post.

Greg


Looking at a video shared with me from a documentary being filmed of US troops in the middle east taking fire from snipers. At one point they have personnel listening in to the enemy comms. One guy is seen tuning the device he's presumably using to listen in with:

AgJyrrD.png


Got the right antenna on there too!
 

fxdscon

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Jay,

For some reason, I can't see the link or photo in your post.

Greg

The photo in his post shows for me, and it also shows in your post where you quoted him.

.
 

Jay911

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It shows up in my post and your quote... make sure you're not blocking Imgur.

It's a screengrab of a guy holding a 396 or 436, with a SMA-BNC adapter and an RH77CA allband whip on it.
 

kd4lcr

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Yes, the Army caught on to the fact that the insurgents were using portable radios to communicate so as result we started picking up portable scanners to use to listen in to them. This was very prominent in Afghanistan more so than in Iraq. Nice thing was if we could hear their chatter we didn't have to really understand what they were saying just that they were saying it - guess what heads up that they are close enough to you were very likely planning to attack you. The "Bear Cats" as we called them were just that Bear Cat scanners. In the scope of things this was a very cheap and easy way to protect yourself.
 

Jay911

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Yes, the Army caught on to the fact that the insurgents were using portable radios to communicate so as result we started picking up portable scanners to use to listen in to them. This was very prominent in Afghanistan more so than in Iraq. Nice thing was if we could hear their chatter we didn't have to really understand what they were saying just that they were saying it - guess what heads up that they are close enough to you were very likely planning to attack you. The "Bear Cats" as we called them were just that Bear Cat scanners. In the scope of things this was a very cheap and easy way to protect yourself.

Thanks for the insight!

For the curious, here's the video this came from.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDvugsSjI6s
 

PACNWDude

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On my trips in that area I made sure our terp had one. He was able to translate the comms, worked well for us.
Eventually I became a spectrum manager in Iraq due to this, well that and my comms background.
Lots of commercial gear is used in combat, I had a lot of Uniden products as well as Garmin Rino radio/GPS units.
Anything commercially available is usually in use by the enemy, it is only smart to monitor and use it to your advantage.
 

prcguy

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There were also a lot of AOR AR-8200MKIIIs sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Radio Reconnaissance Technologies modifies the display LEDs for night vision goggles and also makes portable wide band antennas for them. I have one of the modified RadioReconTech versions with the P25 upgrade and the Flexmaster antenna.
prcguy
 

PACNWDude

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+1 to the previous posters, yes mostly encrypted. And in the clear is usually frequency hopping.

There are a lot of networked WinRadio's also.

I also used an AOR AR-One on the last couple of trips. Great scanner.
 

PACNWDude

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PRCGUY, that company sounded familiar. Looked them up, I used the Hidrah V3 system in Kirkuk.

Although I misspelled it as Hydrah and could not find it.
 

gtaman

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Our troups are encrypted but there's are not.

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk

Some are smart and do go dark. Remember we have stolen equipment out in the battlefield. And they have keys in them. But the kicker is we know the keys because they were ours to begin with.
 

Jay911

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Remember we have stolen equipment out in the battlefield. And they have keys in them. But the kicker is we know the keys because they were ours to begin with.

Please tell me you have tracking capability, making it easier (though far less reversible) to "kill" a stolen radio than on a garden variety trunk system. :D
 

gtaman

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Please tell me you have tracking capability, making it easier (though far less reversible) to "kill" a stolen radio than on a garden variety trunk system. :D

Tactical radios yes, sincgars not really. If we find them we take them. If we see them but can't take them. We destroy them. Because we have the keys. We will OTAR them with dummy keys sometimes.
 

dkf435

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There were also a lot of AOR AR-8200MKIIIs sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Radio Reconnaissance Technologies modifies the display LEDs for night vision goggles and also makes portable wide band antennas for them. I have one of the modified RadioReconTech versions with the P25 upgrade and the Flexmaster antenna.
prcguy

Did some Beta Testing for the AR3000A, tone decoder, Doppler Systems software package for one of the guys doing writing the software.......they had a lot more toys that were not on the website.

David
 
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