First, a disclaimer. I do not condone any of the illegal, immoral or untoward activities mentioned in this tale. I did not do the illegal shenanigans and will not identify the actual evildoers who did some of these. As they say, the names have been changed to protect the guilty. While the statute of limitations has long expired on these dirty deeds, identification of the perpetrators serves no purpose. They (at least those still alive) know what they did was wrong, however much fun it was. Do not do this at home, leave it for the criminal element among us.
Scanners, programmable two-way radios and modified ham gear seem to go hand in hand. Here are some of the shenanigans I have heard about local radio hobbyists committing. While mostly harmless they were funny at the time. The older me would look back at disdain for those who did this stuff, but I still can’t help it if I thought it was funny at the time. There are a few first-hand accounts here as well, these will be self-evident.
Also, I found out that RR has a size limit on posts, so there will be a Part Two shortly!
In no particular order:
Drive Thru “head” sets:
Jim and I were railfanning buddies and we were on a train chasing trip. Jim was active duty in the Air Force at the time so we would stay in guest housing at Air Force Bases when we could. At one base out west someplace, we got billeting then went to the Burger King on base to get some vittles. The drive-in window at the time (mid 80’s) used a UHF frequency for the order taker. Their headsets had two buttons, one for talking to the customer and the other for an in-house intercom. They used different PL codes but talked on the same frequency.
“Stacey” and “Linda” were chatting on the intercom about their interactions with their boyfriends the night before, in great detail. Apparently “Bob” had had a very good experience with one and had apparently experienced the other girl the week before. As they compared notes it was our turn at the order board. Jim and I could barely contain our laughter as we had been listening to these descriptions for several minutes as we patiently waited our turn. After we got our food, I mentioned to Stacey something like “Boy, I wish I were Bob!” She then heard Linda’s voice coming out of the scanner in my car and realized we heard all of their conversation. She turned white as a ghost and yelled back “Linda, they can hear us! Stop talking!”. I just hope I didn’t ruin things for Bob, he seemed like he was getting a lot of action.
More Drive thru happenings:
A lot of non-scanner people wonder why some of us would want to listen to drive-thru headsets. Most of the time it is pretty boring, the reason I did back in the day was not so much for the content but the thrill of the find. Finding new frequencies, however boring the conversations were, was the whole idea.
In the early days of drive-thru headsets McDonalds used 35.02 for the order board and 154.570 or 154.600 for the order taker’s headset. They even used the same PL nationwide so it was pretty easy to find them. Wendy’s used a 460 MHz. pair and Taco Bell used 457/452 channels, at least in the Midwest.
One guy I know (We will call him Billie) recorded some fun he had on various drive-thru’s on a cassette (remember those?) and would share them around. These days this stuff would be some sort of TikTock Challenge or something but that did not exist yet.
One thing our friend Billie would do would be to sit in the area of a drive-thru and watch as a customer pulled in and the order take would ask for the order. Using a 40-watt mobile radio, he would easily over-power the ½ watt order board radio. He would create an order like “25 Big Mac Meals, 10 with Coke, 10 with Diet and 5 with Sprite”. The order taker would reply “OK, that will be $75.32, and it will take a few minutes. Please drive up.” The customer ordering his small coffee would of course be incredulous, and hilarity would ensue trying to figure this out.
Billie would also do similar tricks like ordering Big Mac’s at Wendy’s “on behalf of” a hapless customer, ordering Bud Light at McDonalds for the drink and other nonsense.
Years later, when YouTube became a thing, there was a series of videos where a guy would disguise himself as a seat cover and appear at the order window in a seemingly driverless car. I often though this could have been Billie reincarnated, he would have done just this sort of thing. Of course, since “Billie” is still alive, I am not sure how he could be reincarnated.
Security Phone Patches:
Before cell phones were commonplace mall and building overnight security guards would often have a common UHF two-way portable with a Touchtone keypad. There would be a phone link on the repeater, and he could dial out if he needed something. The keying sequences were easily decoded off the air. I knew a guy who could listen to Touchtones and decipher them in his head without a decoder. (He could also decipher PL codes over the air!) This guy was fascinated by these and lived within range of several. He was able to find out the incoming phone numbers by decoding the access tones and dialing a number at work to view the Caller-ID. He could then occasionally call the security guard to chat or sometimes call one mall’s security from another mall’s system. Our friend needs a life.
Repeater hacking:
We chatted about our departed character Brandt in a prior tale and his proclivity of hacking repeaters to discover their PL codes. While that is not an appropriate thing to do for sure, it was never really disruptive, and he would not interfere with the operations of his conquests.
A few guys I have run into over the years would actively pirate on community repeaters. They would figure out all the tones active on a system and program them in on a PL-capable scanner. They would then lock out the active PL’s. When they felt confident enough, they would start using an inactive PL for chit-chat, mostly at night or weekends. They would back off when legit users would come on the air and sometimes go to a different repeater. They even had a channel plan for their group, comprised of a long list of active but unused PL’s on various Chicago community repeaters. I suppose this could constitute theft of services. At least it was non-interfering.
Crossing Swords:
The next shenanigan was funny at the time but would have landed the perpetrator in some serious hot water if he had been caught. “Johnny Radio” as we will refer to him here was a big fan of cross-band linking from 2M to 440 and back as a ham. There was a group of us that had a series of 440 simplex channels with a common PL code linked to our local 2M simplex channel. We all knew what each other’s UHF link frequency was and could roam all around the area and access our simplex channel by using the nearest UHF link, sort of like Hotspots are done today.
Johnny Radio (or JR for short) took this a step further. He lived on the North Side of Chicago and his dad had been a Chicago PD officer who apparently had had some difficulties with IAD in the past. At the time CPD operated on 460 MHz. “Zone” and “Citywide” dispatch channels for patrol and many operations. There was also some VHF high-band tactical channels that, if you were in range of, were great listening. Internal Affairs (IAD) used these often, and only with portable radios. If you were in range of one of these guys chances were pretty good you were the guy being followed.
Apparently one of the IAD targets lived or patrolled in the area of JR’s home and he would hear the IAD guys following someone around on a regular basis. JR decided to have some fun with IAD. He could hear the local “Zone” (dispatch) channel in the background of the IAD transmissions, so he knew they were listening to the Zone and were probably following some guy while he was on duty.
He had his dual-band radio modified to open the transmit and one day decided to link the IAD tac channel to the local Zone. This caused the IAD guy’s transmissions to go out over the Zone channel. It took a while for the IAD guys to figure it out, probably right after the dispatcher (“Squad”) mentioned something about “Tac Units: Check your channel”. After that JR turned off the link and listened as the IAD guys panicked and were trying to figure out which of them was talking on the wrong radio.
JR and others had been known to do other cross-band link hijinks over the years, usually they were harmless like linking the dispatch channel to the car-to-car channel or something but this was the most notable. I remember once using my (non-modified) dual-bander to listen to the local fire channel and forgetting to change to the ham channel when I turned on the cross-band. While it would not transmit on the fire channel, the fire channel would be rebroadcast on my UHF link frequency.
Natural Human Gag Reflex:
A tape was making the rounds thru the scanner community that was a recording from a cordless phone (back when they were still on 49 MHz. analog). This was pretty common; a lot of these tapes were being passed around back then. This particular call was of two college girls discussing their activities, much like our drive-thru girls mentioned earlier. The takeaway from this particular tape was that one of the girls mentioned the “natural human gag reflex” that would come into play from time to time. I got this tape from one guy and gave it to someone else who then gave it to yet another person.
Eventually the tape made its way to another guy who when he heard it started laughing uproariously, it turned out he was the guy who recorded it in the first place.
Scanners, programmable two-way radios and modified ham gear seem to go hand in hand. Here are some of the shenanigans I have heard about local radio hobbyists committing. While mostly harmless they were funny at the time. The older me would look back at disdain for those who did this stuff, but I still can’t help it if I thought it was funny at the time. There are a few first-hand accounts here as well, these will be self-evident.
Also, I found out that RR has a size limit on posts, so there will be a Part Two shortly!
In no particular order:
Drive Thru “head” sets:
Jim and I were railfanning buddies and we were on a train chasing trip. Jim was active duty in the Air Force at the time so we would stay in guest housing at Air Force Bases when we could. At one base out west someplace, we got billeting then went to the Burger King on base to get some vittles. The drive-in window at the time (mid 80’s) used a UHF frequency for the order taker. Their headsets had two buttons, one for talking to the customer and the other for an in-house intercom. They used different PL codes but talked on the same frequency.
“Stacey” and “Linda” were chatting on the intercom about their interactions with their boyfriends the night before, in great detail. Apparently “Bob” had had a very good experience with one and had apparently experienced the other girl the week before. As they compared notes it was our turn at the order board. Jim and I could barely contain our laughter as we had been listening to these descriptions for several minutes as we patiently waited our turn. After we got our food, I mentioned to Stacey something like “Boy, I wish I were Bob!” She then heard Linda’s voice coming out of the scanner in my car and realized we heard all of their conversation. She turned white as a ghost and yelled back “Linda, they can hear us! Stop talking!”. I just hope I didn’t ruin things for Bob, he seemed like he was getting a lot of action.
More Drive thru happenings:
A lot of non-scanner people wonder why some of us would want to listen to drive-thru headsets. Most of the time it is pretty boring, the reason I did back in the day was not so much for the content but the thrill of the find. Finding new frequencies, however boring the conversations were, was the whole idea.
In the early days of drive-thru headsets McDonalds used 35.02 for the order board and 154.570 or 154.600 for the order taker’s headset. They even used the same PL nationwide so it was pretty easy to find them. Wendy’s used a 460 MHz. pair and Taco Bell used 457/452 channels, at least in the Midwest.
One guy I know (We will call him Billie) recorded some fun he had on various drive-thru’s on a cassette (remember those?) and would share them around. These days this stuff would be some sort of TikTock Challenge or something but that did not exist yet.
One thing our friend Billie would do would be to sit in the area of a drive-thru and watch as a customer pulled in and the order take would ask for the order. Using a 40-watt mobile radio, he would easily over-power the ½ watt order board radio. He would create an order like “25 Big Mac Meals, 10 with Coke, 10 with Diet and 5 with Sprite”. The order taker would reply “OK, that will be $75.32, and it will take a few minutes. Please drive up.” The customer ordering his small coffee would of course be incredulous, and hilarity would ensue trying to figure this out.
Billie would also do similar tricks like ordering Big Mac’s at Wendy’s “on behalf of” a hapless customer, ordering Bud Light at McDonalds for the drink and other nonsense.
Years later, when YouTube became a thing, there was a series of videos where a guy would disguise himself as a seat cover and appear at the order window in a seemingly driverless car. I often though this could have been Billie reincarnated, he would have done just this sort of thing. Of course, since “Billie” is still alive, I am not sure how he could be reincarnated.
Security Phone Patches:
Before cell phones were commonplace mall and building overnight security guards would often have a common UHF two-way portable with a Touchtone keypad. There would be a phone link on the repeater, and he could dial out if he needed something. The keying sequences were easily decoded off the air. I knew a guy who could listen to Touchtones and decipher them in his head without a decoder. (He could also decipher PL codes over the air!) This guy was fascinated by these and lived within range of several. He was able to find out the incoming phone numbers by decoding the access tones and dialing a number at work to view the Caller-ID. He could then occasionally call the security guard to chat or sometimes call one mall’s security from another mall’s system. Our friend needs a life.
Repeater hacking:
We chatted about our departed character Brandt in a prior tale and his proclivity of hacking repeaters to discover their PL codes. While that is not an appropriate thing to do for sure, it was never really disruptive, and he would not interfere with the operations of his conquests.
A few guys I have run into over the years would actively pirate on community repeaters. They would figure out all the tones active on a system and program them in on a PL-capable scanner. They would then lock out the active PL’s. When they felt confident enough, they would start using an inactive PL for chit-chat, mostly at night or weekends. They would back off when legit users would come on the air and sometimes go to a different repeater. They even had a channel plan for their group, comprised of a long list of active but unused PL’s on various Chicago community repeaters. I suppose this could constitute theft of services. At least it was non-interfering.
Crossing Swords:
The next shenanigan was funny at the time but would have landed the perpetrator in some serious hot water if he had been caught. “Johnny Radio” as we will refer to him here was a big fan of cross-band linking from 2M to 440 and back as a ham. There was a group of us that had a series of 440 simplex channels with a common PL code linked to our local 2M simplex channel. We all knew what each other’s UHF link frequency was and could roam all around the area and access our simplex channel by using the nearest UHF link, sort of like Hotspots are done today.
Johnny Radio (or JR for short) took this a step further. He lived on the North Side of Chicago and his dad had been a Chicago PD officer who apparently had had some difficulties with IAD in the past. At the time CPD operated on 460 MHz. “Zone” and “Citywide” dispatch channels for patrol and many operations. There was also some VHF high-band tactical channels that, if you were in range of, were great listening. Internal Affairs (IAD) used these often, and only with portable radios. If you were in range of one of these guys chances were pretty good you were the guy being followed.
Apparently one of the IAD targets lived or patrolled in the area of JR’s home and he would hear the IAD guys following someone around on a regular basis. JR decided to have some fun with IAD. He could hear the local “Zone” (dispatch) channel in the background of the IAD transmissions, so he knew they were listening to the Zone and were probably following some guy while he was on duty.
He had his dual-band radio modified to open the transmit and one day decided to link the IAD tac channel to the local Zone. This caused the IAD guy’s transmissions to go out over the Zone channel. It took a while for the IAD guys to figure it out, probably right after the dispatcher (“Squad”) mentioned something about “Tac Units: Check your channel”. After that JR turned off the link and listened as the IAD guys panicked and were trying to figure out which of them was talking on the wrong radio.
JR and others had been known to do other cross-band link hijinks over the years, usually they were harmless like linking the dispatch channel to the car-to-car channel or something but this was the most notable. I remember once using my (non-modified) dual-bander to listen to the local fire channel and forgetting to change to the ham channel when I turned on the cross-band. While it would not transmit on the fire channel, the fire channel would be rebroadcast on my UHF link frequency.
Natural Human Gag Reflex:
A tape was making the rounds thru the scanner community that was a recording from a cordless phone (back when they were still on 49 MHz. analog). This was pretty common; a lot of these tapes were being passed around back then. This particular call was of two college girls discussing their activities, much like our drive-thru girls mentioned earlier. The takeaway from this particular tape was that one of the girls mentioned the “natural human gag reflex” that would come into play from time to time. I got this tape from one guy and gave it to someone else who then gave it to yet another person.
Eventually the tape made its way to another guy who when he heard it started laughing uproariously, it turned out he was the guy who recorded it in the first place.
