The scanner community has many “characters”, dead and alive. In the Characters series I will talk about a few that I have known over the decades. I will only speak of the ones that have passed away unless I get prior approval from the living ones. For the most part anything they have done the statute of limitations has expired anyway.
One character was Brandt N. Brandt was the very definition of an interesting character. He drove a cab in the suburban Chicago area around O’Hare Airport. He was an old, short guy who looked sort of like Popeye after a week-long bender. While I never knew him to be a drinker, he had to have had a rough life before I met him. He was an extremely heavy smoker which likely contributed greatly to his constant hack and gravelly voice. On the East Coast they would have called him craggy, and he would have been an independent fisherman working in some little coastal town in Maine. In Chicago however he was a cab driver.
I first met Brandt at my first RCMA Meeting in Elk Grove back in the mid 1980’s. He was a long-time member of the Chicago Chapter of RCMA, probably one of the original crowd. He was sitting at a table in the restaurant surrounded by several huge 5-inch 3-ring binders stuffed full of papers. These binders, as I would discover, followed him everywhere. They had lists and lists of frequencies, PL tones and other important radio information.
Now, a little back story here; Until sometime around 1990 the RCMA prohibited the discussion of PL and DPL codes in the Scanner Journal or at meetings. At the time there were no scanners capable of decoding PL codes until the BC760XLT came out around 1998 or so. After that and its clones had been out a while RCMA saw the handwriting on the wall and rescinded the prohibition on discussion PL and DPL codes and they started appearing in the Journal.
As we were not “officially” allowed to discuss PL codes at meetings at the time any such discussion was made in hushed tones or before and after the actual meeting but only with the guys you trusted. I did not know about this rule at my first meeting, so I mentioned a couple of business band and police/fire frequencies along with the PL codes. The room got quiet and the moderator, “Father Ed” (soon to be the subject of another story) then said something like “You must be new here, we do not discuss PL tones”.
Brandt came up to me after the meeting and handed me a stack of paper. He only said, “You don’t know where this came from”. I really didn’t since I had no idea who this troll-looking guy was. The only two guys I knew there then were off talking to someone else so by the time I met up with them again the mysterious troll was gone.
Later when my friends Scott and Dan came back around, I showed them what I had been given and they laughed. One of them said “You have a copy of the “PL List”! This was Brandt’s pride and joy, his reason for living and his obsession. I was told that he lived for PL tones, he searched them out wherever and whenever he could. Only a select few were trusted enough to get a copy from him so I felt validated.
When I got home, I started going over my notes and perused this mysterious “PL List”. This was about 30-40 pages of (mostly) typed frequencies along with PL codes and any repeater inputs he had. It was a wealth of information! There were many handwritten corrections and additions squeezed into every available white space, but they were all pretty much in frequency order with the PL codes, user and inputs.
Talking to other members I came to find out that Brandt compiled these lists from his own monitoring and hacking, social engineering info from techs and users, even by “borrowing” a radio to see if there was a frequency tag. If there was no tag he might have even “liberated” it for a while to determine the codes with a frequency counter attached to a scanner and then return the “found” radio to its owner. He was never a thief, but he certainly was a borrower.
I also found out that Brandt originally used 3x5 index cards to keep track of this data, apparently with each user on a separate card. While this was great for his own use when he started sharing the data with trusted friends he switched to paper lists. He bought a used manual typewriter (like me his handwriting was atrocious) and would periodically type out a new version of the PL List, sneak into an office someplace and run off a dozen or so copies. As new info was found he would hand-write the data on his master copy.
Brandt used many techniques to obtain data for his list. He would not be shy about transmitting on the repeater input trying each PL code in sequence using a variety of programmable radios, sometimes modified ham gear. He would cajole radio technicians out of the info on their customers. He had a frequency counter connected to a scanner that would display approximate readings of PL codes (if it read 156.3 it was probably actually 156.7/5A for example). If someone left a portable radio on the counter he would pick it up and check for a tag under the battery. Sometimes he would even run out to his cab with it and find the PL with the frequency counter before coming back and saying he found the radio in the parking lot. He had no shame but always returned whatever he “borrowed”.
Once he and I met for lunch to discuss some recent finds. I had a pair of TAD M8 radios in my car at the time, one UHF and the other VHF. I used them for ham, GMRS and even my work channels. I had a laminated sheet listing the channel numbers, user and freqs/PL’s I kept on the visor that disappeared. Apparently, he snagged it when I showed him my radios in the car. A couple days later he called me to meet and returned the data sheet that somehow ended up with him, I told him to keep it as it was now out of date; I had changed all the programming.
When the BC760XLT came out he scrimped and saved to buy one and the optional PL board. He would then program in a couple channels of interest with all 38 possible PL codes and scan for the active PL codes. This afforded an easy way to acquire PL info. In a few months he had worn off the numbers and action button labels clear off. By then however he had long memorized the layout due to incessant reprogramming. Remember this was well before computer programmable scanners were invented. Even so, Brandt was just not a computer guy. I don’t know if he even ever had a cell phone. He had plenty of radios though!
Now, let’s talk about his taxicab. He was an independent cab driver and rented a cab from one of the owners of the cab association. In that area most cab companies were mostly a dispatch service for independent car owners. An owner owned one or more cabs and paid for dispatch services. Some cabs were also owned by the Association (as they were called) and leased to the drivers on a daily, monthly or even yearly rate. The driver paid rent on the car, gas and maintenance, and usually drove the cab home, some also used it for their daily driver. Such was the case for Brandt. He drove this Ford LTD Crown Victoria for years and it was basically “his” car. He had some sort of arrangement with the car owner, so he used it all the time. He had his radios installed in it and had at least a dozen NMO mounted antennas on it.
He would drive this cab all over the area and when he attended radio club meetings, he would bring in his stack of binders. These things weighed almost as much as he did but he had to have the entire set at any meeting he attended lest he not be able to recall a detail. This led to much amusement as we watched him struggle with carrying these heavy books. We would offer to help but he always declined.
One day we were at a GMRS club meeting at a forest preserve building in Chicago. Brandt of course had all his binders in tow. Scott and I snuck out and unscrewed all his antennas and left them standing on their mounts unthreaded. He came out and dropped his stack of books on the front seat and slammed the door. Then all the antennas started to fall off, one by one. The look of utter confusion on his face as they tumbled was priceless! Of course, we all were laughing uncontrollably behind the bushes. We came out and offered to help him replace his antennas, but he didn’t remember which went where. Half of them were disconnected but he didn’t recall which. He later told us it took the whole day to trace the cables back. He was a bit upset at first but eventually came around and enjoyed the joke, and I bought his lunch at the scanner club meeting the following weekend, so all was forgiven.
Riding with Brandt was always an adventure. I called him once for a ride to the airport, figuring he would like the extra cash he received for an airport run. He told me to sit in front, but all those binders were there. He told me to just squeeze in and I did but just barely. Thankfully I was skinny back then, there is no way I would have been able to do that today as the rather portly fellow that I am now. My girlfriend however was aghast that we would get into a car that looked as filthy as it smelled. I had quit smoking some years before and she was an avid non-smoker, but she powered her way thru it.
Ted used to tell me the story about a time when he, Fred and Brandt went to an airshow in Champaign, IL, a 300-mile round trip. Brandt balanced these binders on the front bench seat next to Ted and every time he would turn a corner, swerve from lane to lane or make some other crazy maneuver they would tip. Brandt would let go of the wheel to catch them and hold them up while the car would veer all over the place. Now Ted was one of the most fearless men I ever knew but this trip scared the bejeezus out of him. Fred served in the Gulf War and said he would rather meet up with the IRG than to ride with Brandt again.
Soon after meeting Brandt I also met my friend Bob S. Bob had a brand-new Mac Plus computer. He introduced me to FileMaker II, a flat-file program that was (and remains) one of the easiest ways to input and recover data. It was ideal for digitizing the PL List. The problem was I had to type in each record individually. I did, a couple hours a night in the back room of the 7-11 store Bob worked at on the midnight shift. I worked 3-11’s on the police department so would go there after work and use Bob’s computer to enter these records. After a month or so of doing this for several hours several nights a week (my social life was rather slow at the time…) I had all these records entered into the computer. Bob also had an ImageWriter II printer, so we printed this database once I finished entering the data. It took almost 8 hours to print what turned out to be almost 100 pages. Soon thereafter I bought my own Mac and ImageWriter II so I could do this nerd stuff at home.
Before I embarked on this, I asked Brandt if it was OK with him. He agreed as he would have loved to be able to do it himself, but he had no way of doing so. He had no computer and, living in an SRO apartment, wouldn’t have had the room. The best he was able to do was getting one of those Casio data organizers, but he could never get it to work for his purposes. I made some copies of the printout at work and gave the original to Brandt. He and a couple others in our group would tag any updates and once in a while give me that to update the master file.
We soon discovered that by using a specific font and size (Courier 12 IIRC) for large files such as these would allow the ImageWriter II to print at a much faster speed, apparently that was the native font for that printer. Once we found that our we were able to make printouts much faster, under 2 hours for 100 or so pages.
Brandt died in 2002 after moving to Princeton, IL where he had family. His health had been failing for some time. For all his eccentricities he was well loved by RCMA and later CARMA members and, even though we would tease him or pull the occasional prank on him it was always with love and respect. He was basically harmless, and we knew it and tolerated his eccentricities. I think about him from time to time, usually followed by laughter after recalling one of his antics. When chatting with other scanner guys and we discuss PL codes we always raise a glass to him.
One character was Brandt N. Brandt was the very definition of an interesting character. He drove a cab in the suburban Chicago area around O’Hare Airport. He was an old, short guy who looked sort of like Popeye after a week-long bender. While I never knew him to be a drinker, he had to have had a rough life before I met him. He was an extremely heavy smoker which likely contributed greatly to his constant hack and gravelly voice. On the East Coast they would have called him craggy, and he would have been an independent fisherman working in some little coastal town in Maine. In Chicago however he was a cab driver.
I first met Brandt at my first RCMA Meeting in Elk Grove back in the mid 1980’s. He was a long-time member of the Chicago Chapter of RCMA, probably one of the original crowd. He was sitting at a table in the restaurant surrounded by several huge 5-inch 3-ring binders stuffed full of papers. These binders, as I would discover, followed him everywhere. They had lists and lists of frequencies, PL tones and other important radio information.
Now, a little back story here; Until sometime around 1990 the RCMA prohibited the discussion of PL and DPL codes in the Scanner Journal or at meetings. At the time there were no scanners capable of decoding PL codes until the BC760XLT came out around 1998 or so. After that and its clones had been out a while RCMA saw the handwriting on the wall and rescinded the prohibition on discussion PL and DPL codes and they started appearing in the Journal.
As we were not “officially” allowed to discuss PL codes at meetings at the time any such discussion was made in hushed tones or before and after the actual meeting but only with the guys you trusted. I did not know about this rule at my first meeting, so I mentioned a couple of business band and police/fire frequencies along with the PL codes. The room got quiet and the moderator, “Father Ed” (soon to be the subject of another story) then said something like “You must be new here, we do not discuss PL tones”.
Brandt came up to me after the meeting and handed me a stack of paper. He only said, “You don’t know where this came from”. I really didn’t since I had no idea who this troll-looking guy was. The only two guys I knew there then were off talking to someone else so by the time I met up with them again the mysterious troll was gone.
Later when my friends Scott and Dan came back around, I showed them what I had been given and they laughed. One of them said “You have a copy of the “PL List”! This was Brandt’s pride and joy, his reason for living and his obsession. I was told that he lived for PL tones, he searched them out wherever and whenever he could. Only a select few were trusted enough to get a copy from him so I felt validated.
When I got home, I started going over my notes and perused this mysterious “PL List”. This was about 30-40 pages of (mostly) typed frequencies along with PL codes and any repeater inputs he had. It was a wealth of information! There were many handwritten corrections and additions squeezed into every available white space, but they were all pretty much in frequency order with the PL codes, user and inputs.
Talking to other members I came to find out that Brandt compiled these lists from his own monitoring and hacking, social engineering info from techs and users, even by “borrowing” a radio to see if there was a frequency tag. If there was no tag he might have even “liberated” it for a while to determine the codes with a frequency counter attached to a scanner and then return the “found” radio to its owner. He was never a thief, but he certainly was a borrower.
I also found out that Brandt originally used 3x5 index cards to keep track of this data, apparently with each user on a separate card. While this was great for his own use when he started sharing the data with trusted friends he switched to paper lists. He bought a used manual typewriter (like me his handwriting was atrocious) and would periodically type out a new version of the PL List, sneak into an office someplace and run off a dozen or so copies. As new info was found he would hand-write the data on his master copy.
Brandt used many techniques to obtain data for his list. He would not be shy about transmitting on the repeater input trying each PL code in sequence using a variety of programmable radios, sometimes modified ham gear. He would cajole radio technicians out of the info on their customers. He had a frequency counter connected to a scanner that would display approximate readings of PL codes (if it read 156.3 it was probably actually 156.7/5A for example). If someone left a portable radio on the counter he would pick it up and check for a tag under the battery. Sometimes he would even run out to his cab with it and find the PL with the frequency counter before coming back and saying he found the radio in the parking lot. He had no shame but always returned whatever he “borrowed”.
Once he and I met for lunch to discuss some recent finds. I had a pair of TAD M8 radios in my car at the time, one UHF and the other VHF. I used them for ham, GMRS and even my work channels. I had a laminated sheet listing the channel numbers, user and freqs/PL’s I kept on the visor that disappeared. Apparently, he snagged it when I showed him my radios in the car. A couple days later he called me to meet and returned the data sheet that somehow ended up with him, I told him to keep it as it was now out of date; I had changed all the programming.
When the BC760XLT came out he scrimped and saved to buy one and the optional PL board. He would then program in a couple channels of interest with all 38 possible PL codes and scan for the active PL codes. This afforded an easy way to acquire PL info. In a few months he had worn off the numbers and action button labels clear off. By then however he had long memorized the layout due to incessant reprogramming. Remember this was well before computer programmable scanners were invented. Even so, Brandt was just not a computer guy. I don’t know if he even ever had a cell phone. He had plenty of radios though!
Now, let’s talk about his taxicab. He was an independent cab driver and rented a cab from one of the owners of the cab association. In that area most cab companies were mostly a dispatch service for independent car owners. An owner owned one or more cabs and paid for dispatch services. Some cabs were also owned by the Association (as they were called) and leased to the drivers on a daily, monthly or even yearly rate. The driver paid rent on the car, gas and maintenance, and usually drove the cab home, some also used it for their daily driver. Such was the case for Brandt. He drove this Ford LTD Crown Victoria for years and it was basically “his” car. He had some sort of arrangement with the car owner, so he used it all the time. He had his radios installed in it and had at least a dozen NMO mounted antennas on it.
He would drive this cab all over the area and when he attended radio club meetings, he would bring in his stack of binders. These things weighed almost as much as he did but he had to have the entire set at any meeting he attended lest he not be able to recall a detail. This led to much amusement as we watched him struggle with carrying these heavy books. We would offer to help but he always declined.
One day we were at a GMRS club meeting at a forest preserve building in Chicago. Brandt of course had all his binders in tow. Scott and I snuck out and unscrewed all his antennas and left them standing on their mounts unthreaded. He came out and dropped his stack of books on the front seat and slammed the door. Then all the antennas started to fall off, one by one. The look of utter confusion on his face as they tumbled was priceless! Of course, we all were laughing uncontrollably behind the bushes. We came out and offered to help him replace his antennas, but he didn’t remember which went where. Half of them were disconnected but he didn’t recall which. He later told us it took the whole day to trace the cables back. He was a bit upset at first but eventually came around and enjoyed the joke, and I bought his lunch at the scanner club meeting the following weekend, so all was forgiven.
Riding with Brandt was always an adventure. I called him once for a ride to the airport, figuring he would like the extra cash he received for an airport run. He told me to sit in front, but all those binders were there. He told me to just squeeze in and I did but just barely. Thankfully I was skinny back then, there is no way I would have been able to do that today as the rather portly fellow that I am now. My girlfriend however was aghast that we would get into a car that looked as filthy as it smelled. I had quit smoking some years before and she was an avid non-smoker, but she powered her way thru it.
Ted used to tell me the story about a time when he, Fred and Brandt went to an airshow in Champaign, IL, a 300-mile round trip. Brandt balanced these binders on the front bench seat next to Ted and every time he would turn a corner, swerve from lane to lane or make some other crazy maneuver they would tip. Brandt would let go of the wheel to catch them and hold them up while the car would veer all over the place. Now Ted was one of the most fearless men I ever knew but this trip scared the bejeezus out of him. Fred served in the Gulf War and said he would rather meet up with the IRG than to ride with Brandt again.
Soon after meeting Brandt I also met my friend Bob S. Bob had a brand-new Mac Plus computer. He introduced me to FileMaker II, a flat-file program that was (and remains) one of the easiest ways to input and recover data. It was ideal for digitizing the PL List. The problem was I had to type in each record individually. I did, a couple hours a night in the back room of the 7-11 store Bob worked at on the midnight shift. I worked 3-11’s on the police department so would go there after work and use Bob’s computer to enter these records. After a month or so of doing this for several hours several nights a week (my social life was rather slow at the time…) I had all these records entered into the computer. Bob also had an ImageWriter II printer, so we printed this database once I finished entering the data. It took almost 8 hours to print what turned out to be almost 100 pages. Soon thereafter I bought my own Mac and ImageWriter II so I could do this nerd stuff at home.
Before I embarked on this, I asked Brandt if it was OK with him. He agreed as he would have loved to be able to do it himself, but he had no way of doing so. He had no computer and, living in an SRO apartment, wouldn’t have had the room. The best he was able to do was getting one of those Casio data organizers, but he could never get it to work for his purposes. I made some copies of the printout at work and gave the original to Brandt. He and a couple others in our group would tag any updates and once in a while give me that to update the master file.
We soon discovered that by using a specific font and size (Courier 12 IIRC) for large files such as these would allow the ImageWriter II to print at a much faster speed, apparently that was the native font for that printer. Once we found that our we were able to make printouts much faster, under 2 hours for 100 or so pages.
Brandt died in 2002 after moving to Princeton, IL where he had family. His health had been failing for some time. For all his eccentricities he was well loved by RCMA and later CARMA members and, even though we would tease him or pull the occasional prank on him it was always with love and respect. He was basically harmless, and we knew it and tolerated his eccentricities. I think about him from time to time, usually followed by laughter after recalling one of his antics. When chatting with other scanner guys and we discuss PL codes we always raise a glass to him.
