Now for something a little different with Scanner Tales: Short one-off stories about specific events. Enjoy!
I got a call from a friend who was at the time the Village President of a small town next to the one I was a police officer in. As a Ham and the trustee of one of the larger ham repeater clubs in the area he and I often had a lot to discuss. One day he called me and asked for help tracking down a transmitter of some sort that was blasting away on the input to one of their repeaters and causing all kinds of havoc. He was able to pinpoint the location of the transmitter to an area on the west side of my town.
I met him in the area and as all I had with me at the time was a PRO43 scanner and all he had was his 440 band handheld we had to improvise a bit. We drove around the area until we were able to hear the transmitter on his handheld. We figured it was slightly off-frequency for his repeater input but strong and close enough to interfere with it. We could hear voices but could not make out what was being said. Was it a different language, distorted by being off-freq or both?
Next we tuned my PRO43 to the same frequency and were able to hear it. We then removed the antenna off the scanner and drove around to where we could hear it without the antenna connected. It turned out to be right in front of a large home. We were pretty sure that this was the source.
We knocked on the door and the resident opened the door. We explained we were trying to locate the source of some radio interference. The lady was Asian and spoke very broken English. I assured her they were not in trouble and we were not there as the police, but just to figure out what was interfering with the radio system. She called her maid, who was bilingual and then they invited us in to try to find the source. Just then it stopped. She called upstairs to her daughter, who came down carrying a cordless phone of a type I had never seen before. We asked her to make a call and as soon as she pressed the button on the phone the noise came up.
They showed us the phone, it turned out to be a Chinese model they brought back from China a month or two before, about the same time the interference had started. We looked at it and from what we could figure out, it transmitted 10-15 watts on 448.31275 (I could be wrong on the freq, it was 40 years or so ago…). We told her that it actually was not allowed to be used in the USA as it was not type accepted and on frequencies not allowed for cordless phones as well as at too high a power level. They agreed to dispose of the phone and we never heard it again. We thanked them and took our leave.
I got a call from a friend who was at the time the Village President of a small town next to the one I was a police officer in. As a Ham and the trustee of one of the larger ham repeater clubs in the area he and I often had a lot to discuss. One day he called me and asked for help tracking down a transmitter of some sort that was blasting away on the input to one of their repeaters and causing all kinds of havoc. He was able to pinpoint the location of the transmitter to an area on the west side of my town.
I met him in the area and as all I had with me at the time was a PRO43 scanner and all he had was his 440 band handheld we had to improvise a bit. We drove around the area until we were able to hear the transmitter on his handheld. We figured it was slightly off-frequency for his repeater input but strong and close enough to interfere with it. We could hear voices but could not make out what was being said. Was it a different language, distorted by being off-freq or both?
Next we tuned my PRO43 to the same frequency and were able to hear it. We then removed the antenna off the scanner and drove around to where we could hear it without the antenna connected. It turned out to be right in front of a large home. We were pretty sure that this was the source.
We knocked on the door and the resident opened the door. We explained we were trying to locate the source of some radio interference. The lady was Asian and spoke very broken English. I assured her they were not in trouble and we were not there as the police, but just to figure out what was interfering with the radio system. She called her maid, who was bilingual and then they invited us in to try to find the source. Just then it stopped. She called upstairs to her daughter, who came down carrying a cordless phone of a type I had never seen before. We asked her to make a call and as soon as she pressed the button on the phone the noise came up.
They showed us the phone, it turned out to be a Chinese model they brought back from China a month or two before, about the same time the interference had started. We looked at it and from what we could figure out, it transmitted 10-15 watts on 448.31275 (I could be wrong on the freq, it was 40 years or so ago…). We told her that it actually was not allowed to be used in the USA as it was not type accepted and on frequencies not allowed for cordless phones as well as at too high a power level. They agreed to dispose of the phone and we never heard it again. We thanked them and took our leave.
