A year and a half ago back I wrote about Shenanigans and a month or so ago I wrote “Fun in the Radio Room”. Today I will tell the tales of a couple other fun things done on radios. The statute of limitations has long passed on these by now, so I don’t worry too much about any consequences for some of this.
CW stands for “Crazy Words””:
I am a ham and I had to pass a Morse Code test in order to get my license way back before the No-Code licenses were established. The only reason I passed is that I noticed I had properly included a period in the message copy, otherwise I would have missed it by one character. At the time punctuation marks counted as 2 letters, the examiner had only credited me with the letters. IIRC the rules said I had to have 30 consecutive characters, I had 28 letters and spaces but there was a period in there which got me to the 30 I needed. The examiner insisted that punctuation did not count but I had read that it did and was backed up by another examiner at the session. I was then passed and a couple weeks later I got my callsign.
Phony Phonetics:
That V.E. guy was kind of an old crank, and he wasn’t happy about me going over his head to pass my CW test. When I got my license a couple weeks later, I called my buddies who were also in that class on the club repeater and apparently committed a cardinal sin. Since we were all cops or dispatchers, we used police style phonetics. I used Nora 9 John Ida George but got chastised by this old guy who said that we were not allowed to use those phonetics, he said I should have said “November Niner Juliet India Golf”. I asked for guidance: “Is this in the rules someplace?”
He said “Yes, I just gave them to you!”. After that little rebuke the 6 of us quit the club and I requested by dues back; I never got the refund, but the point was made. A few years later a guy I know became president of the same club and I relayed that story to him. He wasn’t surprised and said they ran him off the board and VE sessions over other similar issues.
What is that callsign?:
At work, around 2008, we replaced our old Micor simplex base stations with newer MTR2000’s. These were 100-watt base stations and were easy to set up. When they were installed, we did not specify CW IDs as our dispatchers were used to using callsigns regularly. A year or two later I noticed that one of the radios did transmit a CWID on a regular basis. Since I could not read code (I lost whatever ability I had years ago, within days of passing my ham test…) I read the radio with the RSS and discovered it had “Callsign” listed for the automatic ID’er. My presumption was that a radio tech had used a codeplug template containing that when they changed a PL code on one of our channels.
Now I figured that if nobody noticed it and our dispatchers faithfully used callsigns, there would be no harm in having a little fun. I set the “Callsign” to send “Richie” (what many of the guys called me there) once every half-hour in “Polite” mode with no PL code sent. On the other radio I set it for “Sheriff”, a more common nickname for me back then. Since all the radios were set for PL (or DPL) decode, no one would hear the CWID unless they were in monitor mode. Since our repeaters already had CWID setup the few times they did hear it they would just ignore it.
I figured I would let this run for a week or two to see if anyone noticed, no one did.
Well, I promptly forgot all about this. These channels faithfully transmitted my nicknames 48 times a day for more than 7 years. I read one of the radios in order to change a DPL Code on one of the channels just a month or so before I retired and moved away and discovered that this was still so programmed.
In 7 years, no one noticed. If I hadn’t caught it while doing something else, it would still be doing that for 11 more years beyond the 7 or so they already had. AFAIK the same base radios are in place; they were still there the last time I visited a couple years ago. Of course, they probably transmit the proper CW these days, unless someone else changed them. I am surprised however that a couple years later, when I added CW ID’s (with the proper callsigns) to the Quantar repeaters sitting on the next rack over that I didn’t think of fixing the MTRs.
Pre-ECPA Fun with Cellphones:
It wasn’t always illegal to listen to cell phones. Before the ECPA was passed in the 1980’s one could listen in all they wanted. This was also true for the old VHF and UHF radio telephones. Those pre-cellular mobile phones used a pilot tone in order to direct the user to the next available frequency (of which there were very few of). I never really understood how it all worked beyond that. What I did discover is that the same type of tone was used on the pseudo-trunking system the Ontario Provincial Police used in the 1980’s and 1990’s on 141 MHz. I bought a scanner (BC220 I think) in Ontario that had a filter for that tone, and it worked great on those old UHF and VHF phone systems.
When one saw someone using a mobile phone, it was fun trying to find the call on the scanner. With pre-digital cellular and a PRO2004 it was easy, just search the 824-850 range and you will likely find them pretty quickly, then add 45 MHz. to hear the other party. You might also find the guy in the car behind you or something but usually you could find the guy you were looking at in short order. On the older systems there were UHF, VHF high and VHF low systems but one could usually figure out what band they were on by the antennas used on the car. Once you did find him, and the guy’s windows were open, it was fun to turn the scanner up all the way at a stoplight and let him listen to his call coming from your car. Of course, after ECPA was passed we all reinstalled the diodes in all our scanners to disable the cellular bands.
My Dad worked for the phone company in the Chicago area and was the project manager for parts of the phone company side of things, so he had an early mobile phone installed in his company car. From what I recall it looked like a pair of Micors and had two 800 MHz. elevated feed “pigtail” type antennas on the trunk. At the time there was only 3 cell sites in the Chicago area, one on one of the big skyscrapers downtown, one at Motorola’s HQ in Schaumburg and another in Northbrook alongside the Tri-State Tollway just north of Willow Road. We lived within 5 miles of the Northbrook site.
At first the mobile “phone” was pretty much just two radios matched to a handset. There was a way for Dad to change channels on the phone so he could “monitor” other calls for “quality control”.
Later, after he retired and moved to Arizona is when the PRO2004 came out. I went there on vacation and brought my 2004 with me. He was aghast that one could listen to these calls on a “cheap $400 scanner”. While he expressed his disdain he went to the mall and picked one up for himself. I clipped the diode for him.
I often brought my 2004 with me in the squad car when working midnights. In a small town (think Mayberry) it is easy to find cars at 3AM when one hears them on a scanner. My what a little Peyton Place that town could be! Of course, I stopped doing that in 1986 after the ECPA was passed.
Fun with CloseCall:
I have been fascinated by CloseCall and other nearfield reception solutions since I first acquired an OptoElectronics Scout a million or so years ago. At first it was pretty much gathering the hits and if I was quick enough, I could listen in with a scanner after programming it in. Then I bought an AR8000 and the special ribbon cable with the slotted battery door. This connected the Scout to the AR8000 and automatically tuned it to the discovered frequency from the Scout. Pretty soon I added the Mini plug to the AR8000 to replace the ribbon cable with a more reliable radio connection.
This combination served me well, so I bought a second set to mount in the car. Yeah, it was kind of unwieldy, especially when walking around the mall, but it was worth it. I could now find all kinds of radio traffic I didn’t know even existed. While most of it was Suzy the clerk at the boutique talking to her manager in the stock room occasionally, I would find some really juicy stuff. Mall Security was always fun to listen to, even if they were not happy about it. I tried to keep a low profile but there is only so much you can do to hide an oversized portable radio connected to a crazy little frequency counter. Back before Radio Shack went under, I would pop in and program the mall security channel into all the scanners on display, even their secret-squirrel ones. My local mall actually had 2 different Radio Shacks in it on opposite sides of the mall, so I had to hit both.
On the few times I was approached by a security guard at the mall I was able to talk my way out of any further interruption in my “work”. I would tell him that “I work for the government”, it was always fun to see their reaction. Usually they would just say “Oh, I’m sorry” and move on. I wasn’t lying though, I did work for the government, just not for any that had any jurisdiction there. I didn’t feel that had any relevance to the situation. Other times I would just say “I was listening to the ball game” as I would be using earphones. While there was nothing illegal about what I was doing I was on private property and didn’t want to have to deal with Officer Blart exerting his authority.
When the BCD396T came out I really got into CloseCall. I now had a much smaller radio that would do nearfield detection and reception all by itself. This got even better with the 325 as one did not have to press a button to see the frequency and PL or DPL code like one did on the 396 and other Pre-P2 Uniden’s. The 325 is an awesome scanner and rivals the BCD436HP for my favorite handheld. The small size makes it easy to pop in a shirt pocket to walk around with in CloseCall mode. I use one of those ubiquitous Apple wired Air Pod earphones and no one even takes a glance at me.
Is that a wireless mic I hear or are you happy to hear me?
I got a call from a friend who had stumbled across a weird thing at one of the local malls, a couple miles from the apartment I lived in at the time. I tried to listen for it from home but could not hear it so I hopped in the car with my trusty BC200XLT and met him there. He was walking thru a department store and, as he was want to do, searching the UHF business band. He came across an open carrier that he was about to lockout as some sort of birdie when he started to hear voices.
We found a safe spot to sit and listen for a while and figured out it was probably in a woman’s wear department based on the discussions. They weren’t talking on radios; it sounded like it was picking up whatever was happening around that area.
We started to triangulate it by removing the antennas off our scanners until we came across it again. Sure enough, we found it was originating from the “Intimate Apparel” section. Since they probably would frown upon a couple of manly men using those changing rooms we had to enlist the help of my girlfriend. I called her up and asked her to meet us at the mall. While skeptical, she agreed to do so. We got her to go in and try some garments on for size and look for any electronic gear while doing so. She did not see anything, but we could hear her loud and clear on the scanner. I offered to buy one of the things she tried on, in fact I kind of insisted on it, but she would not give me that satisfaction. We were able to hear her as we asked her to cough 3 times to make sure it was there.
We then figured out that they were probably using some sort of radio to listen in for theft prevention since they would probably not be allowed to have cameras in the changing rooms. While that had occurred from time to time, people tend to frown upon cameras in these places, but audio surveillance is fair game. All the sales droids carried portable UHF radios with earphones, so I assume that were listening in with them. I assume it could also be monitored in the security office.
We searched out the rest of the band and could not find any other transmitters like that. We also tried other malls with the same department store and no joy there either. We were able to hear it for at least a year or so after that.
Zone, Zone, everywhere a Zone Zone:
Back in the day we had a big bunch of GM300 radios. These were awesome; easy to program, even easier to use. A friend called and asked me to help him program a new (to him anyway) M1225. I had the cable (same as the GM300) and a copy of the software but had never done one before. I figured it shouldn’t be too difficult, and the software looked pretty simple, especially since it ran natively in Windows rather than DOS like the other radios I was used to did at the time.
I read the radio, then changed a couple of the channels a bit (one had the wrong talk-in frequency, another needed a PL changed) and all was right with the world again.
A couple weeks later he called again and asked if I could add a couple additional channels to the radio. No problem! I already had the codeplug on the laptop, so I added the two channels to the channel list, and we wrote that to the radio. No joy there; the new channels did not appear. We did it again, still no joy. OK, now I was ticked off. I read the radio and verified that the channels were showing up in the list. They were. What the heck was going on here? Time for F1. I started to read the Help Files in the software. After a half hour or so of reading I discovered that on these radios you needed to create Zones and can add Channels to one or more Zones.
Well, this radio came with one Zone already created and 8 or 9 channels, all of which were in Zone 1. Adding the new channels to the Channel List (or whatever they called it) was only step 1, you have to then add the new channels to a Zone for them to actually be seen by the user. Once I figured this out, I was able to properly program that little radio.
A couple years later someone asked me to program a PSR500 scanner. As a Uniden type of guy, I had never dealt with one of these before but gave it a shot. When the new channels did not appear after programming, I remembered my issues with that M1225 and realized these new-fangled GREs worked just the same way. I added it to a Scanlist (which would have been a Zone on a Motorola) and it all worked well.
Since then, I became adept at programming various Motorola and other brand radios, even GRE’s. I remembered this little tidbit and never had that problem again.
CW stands for “Crazy Words””:
I am a ham and I had to pass a Morse Code test in order to get my license way back before the No-Code licenses were established. The only reason I passed is that I noticed I had properly included a period in the message copy, otherwise I would have missed it by one character. At the time punctuation marks counted as 2 letters, the examiner had only credited me with the letters. IIRC the rules said I had to have 30 consecutive characters, I had 28 letters and spaces but there was a period in there which got me to the 30 I needed. The examiner insisted that punctuation did not count but I had read that it did and was backed up by another examiner at the session. I was then passed and a couple weeks later I got my callsign.
Phony Phonetics:
That V.E. guy was kind of an old crank, and he wasn’t happy about me going over his head to pass my CW test. When I got my license a couple weeks later, I called my buddies who were also in that class on the club repeater and apparently committed a cardinal sin. Since we were all cops or dispatchers, we used police style phonetics. I used Nora 9 John Ida George but got chastised by this old guy who said that we were not allowed to use those phonetics, he said I should have said “November Niner Juliet India Golf”. I asked for guidance: “Is this in the rules someplace?”
He said “Yes, I just gave them to you!”. After that little rebuke the 6 of us quit the club and I requested by dues back; I never got the refund, but the point was made. A few years later a guy I know became president of the same club and I relayed that story to him. He wasn’t surprised and said they ran him off the board and VE sessions over other similar issues.
What is that callsign?:
At work, around 2008, we replaced our old Micor simplex base stations with newer MTR2000’s. These were 100-watt base stations and were easy to set up. When they were installed, we did not specify CW IDs as our dispatchers were used to using callsigns regularly. A year or two later I noticed that one of the radios did transmit a CWID on a regular basis. Since I could not read code (I lost whatever ability I had years ago, within days of passing my ham test…) I read the radio with the RSS and discovered it had “Callsign” listed for the automatic ID’er. My presumption was that a radio tech had used a codeplug template containing that when they changed a PL code on one of our channels.
Now I figured that if nobody noticed it and our dispatchers faithfully used callsigns, there would be no harm in having a little fun. I set the “Callsign” to send “Richie” (what many of the guys called me there) once every half-hour in “Polite” mode with no PL code sent. On the other radio I set it for “Sheriff”, a more common nickname for me back then. Since all the radios were set for PL (or DPL) decode, no one would hear the CWID unless they were in monitor mode. Since our repeaters already had CWID setup the few times they did hear it they would just ignore it.
I figured I would let this run for a week or two to see if anyone noticed, no one did.
Well, I promptly forgot all about this. These channels faithfully transmitted my nicknames 48 times a day for more than 7 years. I read one of the radios in order to change a DPL Code on one of the channels just a month or so before I retired and moved away and discovered that this was still so programmed.
In 7 years, no one noticed. If I hadn’t caught it while doing something else, it would still be doing that for 11 more years beyond the 7 or so they already had. AFAIK the same base radios are in place; they were still there the last time I visited a couple years ago. Of course, they probably transmit the proper CW these days, unless someone else changed them. I am surprised however that a couple years later, when I added CW ID’s (with the proper callsigns) to the Quantar repeaters sitting on the next rack over that I didn’t think of fixing the MTRs.
Pre-ECPA Fun with Cellphones:
It wasn’t always illegal to listen to cell phones. Before the ECPA was passed in the 1980’s one could listen in all they wanted. This was also true for the old VHF and UHF radio telephones. Those pre-cellular mobile phones used a pilot tone in order to direct the user to the next available frequency (of which there were very few of). I never really understood how it all worked beyond that. What I did discover is that the same type of tone was used on the pseudo-trunking system the Ontario Provincial Police used in the 1980’s and 1990’s on 141 MHz. I bought a scanner (BC220 I think) in Ontario that had a filter for that tone, and it worked great on those old UHF and VHF phone systems.
When one saw someone using a mobile phone, it was fun trying to find the call on the scanner. With pre-digital cellular and a PRO2004 it was easy, just search the 824-850 range and you will likely find them pretty quickly, then add 45 MHz. to hear the other party. You might also find the guy in the car behind you or something but usually you could find the guy you were looking at in short order. On the older systems there were UHF, VHF high and VHF low systems but one could usually figure out what band they were on by the antennas used on the car. Once you did find him, and the guy’s windows were open, it was fun to turn the scanner up all the way at a stoplight and let him listen to his call coming from your car. Of course, after ECPA was passed we all reinstalled the diodes in all our scanners to disable the cellular bands.
My Dad worked for the phone company in the Chicago area and was the project manager for parts of the phone company side of things, so he had an early mobile phone installed in his company car. From what I recall it looked like a pair of Micors and had two 800 MHz. elevated feed “pigtail” type antennas on the trunk. At the time there was only 3 cell sites in the Chicago area, one on one of the big skyscrapers downtown, one at Motorola’s HQ in Schaumburg and another in Northbrook alongside the Tri-State Tollway just north of Willow Road. We lived within 5 miles of the Northbrook site.
At first the mobile “phone” was pretty much just two radios matched to a handset. There was a way for Dad to change channels on the phone so he could “monitor” other calls for “quality control”.
Later, after he retired and moved to Arizona is when the PRO2004 came out. I went there on vacation and brought my 2004 with me. He was aghast that one could listen to these calls on a “cheap $400 scanner”. While he expressed his disdain he went to the mall and picked one up for himself. I clipped the diode for him.
I often brought my 2004 with me in the squad car when working midnights. In a small town (think Mayberry) it is easy to find cars at 3AM when one hears them on a scanner. My what a little Peyton Place that town could be! Of course, I stopped doing that in 1986 after the ECPA was passed.
Fun with CloseCall:
I have been fascinated by CloseCall and other nearfield reception solutions since I first acquired an OptoElectronics Scout a million or so years ago. At first it was pretty much gathering the hits and if I was quick enough, I could listen in with a scanner after programming it in. Then I bought an AR8000 and the special ribbon cable with the slotted battery door. This connected the Scout to the AR8000 and automatically tuned it to the discovered frequency from the Scout. Pretty soon I added the Mini plug to the AR8000 to replace the ribbon cable with a more reliable radio connection.
This combination served me well, so I bought a second set to mount in the car. Yeah, it was kind of unwieldy, especially when walking around the mall, but it was worth it. I could now find all kinds of radio traffic I didn’t know even existed. While most of it was Suzy the clerk at the boutique talking to her manager in the stock room occasionally, I would find some really juicy stuff. Mall Security was always fun to listen to, even if they were not happy about it. I tried to keep a low profile but there is only so much you can do to hide an oversized portable radio connected to a crazy little frequency counter. Back before Radio Shack went under, I would pop in and program the mall security channel into all the scanners on display, even their secret-squirrel ones. My local mall actually had 2 different Radio Shacks in it on opposite sides of the mall, so I had to hit both.
On the few times I was approached by a security guard at the mall I was able to talk my way out of any further interruption in my “work”. I would tell him that “I work for the government”, it was always fun to see their reaction. Usually they would just say “Oh, I’m sorry” and move on. I wasn’t lying though, I did work for the government, just not for any that had any jurisdiction there. I didn’t feel that had any relevance to the situation. Other times I would just say “I was listening to the ball game” as I would be using earphones. While there was nothing illegal about what I was doing I was on private property and didn’t want to have to deal with Officer Blart exerting his authority.
When the BCD396T came out I really got into CloseCall. I now had a much smaller radio that would do nearfield detection and reception all by itself. This got even better with the 325 as one did not have to press a button to see the frequency and PL or DPL code like one did on the 396 and other Pre-P2 Uniden’s. The 325 is an awesome scanner and rivals the BCD436HP for my favorite handheld. The small size makes it easy to pop in a shirt pocket to walk around with in CloseCall mode. I use one of those ubiquitous Apple wired Air Pod earphones and no one even takes a glance at me.
Is that a wireless mic I hear or are you happy to hear me?
I got a call from a friend who had stumbled across a weird thing at one of the local malls, a couple miles from the apartment I lived in at the time. I tried to listen for it from home but could not hear it so I hopped in the car with my trusty BC200XLT and met him there. He was walking thru a department store and, as he was want to do, searching the UHF business band. He came across an open carrier that he was about to lockout as some sort of birdie when he started to hear voices.
We found a safe spot to sit and listen for a while and figured out it was probably in a woman’s wear department based on the discussions. They weren’t talking on radios; it sounded like it was picking up whatever was happening around that area.
We started to triangulate it by removing the antennas off our scanners until we came across it again. Sure enough, we found it was originating from the “Intimate Apparel” section. Since they probably would frown upon a couple of manly men using those changing rooms we had to enlist the help of my girlfriend. I called her up and asked her to meet us at the mall. While skeptical, she agreed to do so. We got her to go in and try some garments on for size and look for any electronic gear while doing so. She did not see anything, but we could hear her loud and clear on the scanner. I offered to buy one of the things she tried on, in fact I kind of insisted on it, but she would not give me that satisfaction. We were able to hear her as we asked her to cough 3 times to make sure it was there.
We then figured out that they were probably using some sort of radio to listen in for theft prevention since they would probably not be allowed to have cameras in the changing rooms. While that had occurred from time to time, people tend to frown upon cameras in these places, but audio surveillance is fair game. All the sales droids carried portable UHF radios with earphones, so I assume that were listening in with them. I assume it could also be monitored in the security office.
We searched out the rest of the band and could not find any other transmitters like that. We also tried other malls with the same department store and no joy there either. We were able to hear it for at least a year or so after that.
Zone, Zone, everywhere a Zone Zone:
Back in the day we had a big bunch of GM300 radios. These were awesome; easy to program, even easier to use. A friend called and asked me to help him program a new (to him anyway) M1225. I had the cable (same as the GM300) and a copy of the software but had never done one before. I figured it shouldn’t be too difficult, and the software looked pretty simple, especially since it ran natively in Windows rather than DOS like the other radios I was used to did at the time.
I read the radio, then changed a couple of the channels a bit (one had the wrong talk-in frequency, another needed a PL changed) and all was right with the world again.
A couple weeks later he called again and asked if I could add a couple additional channels to the radio. No problem! I already had the codeplug on the laptop, so I added the two channels to the channel list, and we wrote that to the radio. No joy there; the new channels did not appear. We did it again, still no joy. OK, now I was ticked off. I read the radio and verified that the channels were showing up in the list. They were. What the heck was going on here? Time for F1. I started to read the Help Files in the software. After a half hour or so of reading I discovered that on these radios you needed to create Zones and can add Channels to one or more Zones.
Well, this radio came with one Zone already created and 8 or 9 channels, all of which were in Zone 1. Adding the new channels to the Channel List (or whatever they called it) was only step 1, you have to then add the new channels to a Zone for them to actually be seen by the user. Once I figured this out, I was able to properly program that little radio.
A couple years later someone asked me to program a PSR500 scanner. As a Uniden type of guy, I had never dealt with one of these before but gave it a shot. When the new channels did not appear after programming, I remembered my issues with that M1225 and realized these new-fangled GREs worked just the same way. I added it to a Scanlist (which would have been a Zone on a Motorola) and it all worked well.
Since then, I became adept at programming various Motorola and other brand radios, even GRE’s. I remembered this little tidbit and never had that problem again.
