Due to post size limitations I had to break this one up into two parts, here is Part Two:
Fun with 210:
There was a tape making the rounds in the Chicagoland scanner hobby of some intentional yet unintentional interference with a local FBI repeater, known locally as “210” for the callsign assigned to them. Turns out that some guy found a radio someplace (supposedly) and started talking on it, not knowing who it belonged to. A quick-witted dispatcher engaged the guy to determine where he was. She had a nice voice, and the guy was trying to get her to meet him. Meanwhile field agents were trying to accomplish their normal check-ins etc. but the dispatcher had them move off to another channel. She was able to convince the guy with the lost/stolen radio that they were a trucking company. She agreed to meet with him at a coffee shop and when he showed up, he was met, not by the cute-sounding dispatcher but rather by a pair of FBI agents. The tape ended with the agents announcing that they had one in custody. The dispatcher did a great job stringing this guy along until he could be caught. Kudos also to my friend that recorded this for our enjoyment. I wish I still had that tape!
The Cellular Blues:
If you are old enough to remember when cell phones were the exception rather than the rule you may have had a PRO2004/5/6 scanner modified with cellular enabled. The PRO2004/5/6 series was infamous for this as it came all set with the standard 30 KHz. channel spacing. It would also listen to the inputs (45 MHz. down), again with the proper channel spacing. If you saw a guy on a cell phone back then it was an easy task to find his call.
Prior to the ECPA’s passage that ruined the fun I used to listen to cellular calls while working the midnight shift, they were often drug deals, professional women (and occasional men) negotiating clients or other nefarious situations. Of course, after ECPA was passed I never listened to cell phones ever again…
One of the CARMA members retained his analog Motorola Flip-Phone well into the digital transition. The voice clarity on the older wide-band analog portion of the cellular network was infinitely better than the narrow digital system. He wanted to keep that analog phone forever, he would likely still have it now if it still worked. Eventually however the cellular companies switched off the analog channels and it all went to some format of digital.
Being analog however made it easy to listen in on his phone calls. At CARMA meetings he would call his wife, girlfriend or whomever and of course half of us would rush to find his conversation on whatever cellular capable scanner we had with us at the time. It was made even easier as time went on as his was likely the only analog activity in range. He would get mad and ***** and moan but there wasn’t much he could do, as he would have just as likely been doing it to us if the roles were reversed.
I remember fondly seeing a guy in the car ahead of me talking on his cell phone and setting my 2006 to search the cellular inputs until I found him. I might have occasionally pulled up alongside him and accidentally had the volume way too loud causing him to hear himself and having no clue where that was coming from. I am sure there are a ton of stories about fun with cell phones before ECPA and the digital transition.
Alpha Charlie:
We had a member of CARMA who was likely the nicest guy you ever met in your life; we will call him Charlie. If you needed help, he would be the first to offer a hand. He was however kind of a weird dude. He tried so hard to be a part of every activity and there were times when he just was not welcome. We all know someone like this.
There was the time at a club picnic when one of the members took his girlfriend out in the woods for some “alone time” and Charlie was worried they would have gotten lost, and we should go and find them. The others would have to hold him back and tell him that maybe they don’t want to be find, they are having more fun being lost, which was lost on Charlie.
One of the things Charlie would do was to record the state police emergency channel on cassette with a Nite-Logger device that would activate cassette recorders of the day on VOX. In those days the Nite-Logger was a hot accessory, right up there with the Opto toys of the time. One of our friends had an Icom H-16 two-way radio. We had discovered that if you program a channel for RX only on the H16 and its companion U16 UHF radio that it only disabled the RF power amp, it will still transmit on the exciter only, albeit at such low power that it could only be heard a couple dozen feet away. We called this “Super-Secret Low Power Mode” and used it for car-to-car traffic. It worked well as long as you were pretty much tailgating the guy you were talking to.
Our friend went by Charlie’s house and, following the script of the State Police dispatchers, made a fake broadcast about a chase involving Charlie’s vehicle thru his neighborhood. Charlie came running out of his house in a panic looking for his car, which was parked undisturbed in his driveway. Charlie looked around, didn’t see anything, scratched his head a few times and went back inside. Our friend waited a few weeks and did a similar thing, this time while Charlie was at work, about a manhunt in Charlie’s neighborhood. The next day Charlie called a couple of us and asked if we hear about the shooting and manhunt around his home, none of had of course since it didn’t happen. To this day I don’t think Charlie ever figured out what was (or wasn’t) going on in his neighborhood that summer.
Punch & Judy
For several years several CARMA members used a GMRS repeater for chatting about social events and radio stuff. It was also used for some personal communications, actually the whole reason GMRS existed.
One couple in particular used our GMRS system extensively. The husband worked in law enforcement, I don’t recall what the wife did. They would talk many times a day, about the most inane topics imaginable. Imagine the most routine texts we exchange with out families today, that is the kind of stuff they talked about all day long.
“Punch and Judy” would bicker about the most minor of topics. He would say the sky is blue and she would counter with it being grey. He would say “Grey” is spelled with an “E”, she would counter that it was with an “A”. They would argue about who’s turn it was to do the dishes, make dinner, or if it cost a quarter or 25 cents to make a phone call. It got so bad that we had to set up a separate PL tone for them so we didn’t have to listen to them all the time.
Fun with 210:
There was a tape making the rounds in the Chicagoland scanner hobby of some intentional yet unintentional interference with a local FBI repeater, known locally as “210” for the callsign assigned to them. Turns out that some guy found a radio someplace (supposedly) and started talking on it, not knowing who it belonged to. A quick-witted dispatcher engaged the guy to determine where he was. She had a nice voice, and the guy was trying to get her to meet him. Meanwhile field agents were trying to accomplish their normal check-ins etc. but the dispatcher had them move off to another channel. She was able to convince the guy with the lost/stolen radio that they were a trucking company. She agreed to meet with him at a coffee shop and when he showed up, he was met, not by the cute-sounding dispatcher but rather by a pair of FBI agents. The tape ended with the agents announcing that they had one in custody. The dispatcher did a great job stringing this guy along until he could be caught. Kudos also to my friend that recorded this for our enjoyment. I wish I still had that tape!
The Cellular Blues:
If you are old enough to remember when cell phones were the exception rather than the rule you may have had a PRO2004/5/6 scanner modified with cellular enabled. The PRO2004/5/6 series was infamous for this as it came all set with the standard 30 KHz. channel spacing. It would also listen to the inputs (45 MHz. down), again with the proper channel spacing. If you saw a guy on a cell phone back then it was an easy task to find his call.
Prior to the ECPA’s passage that ruined the fun I used to listen to cellular calls while working the midnight shift, they were often drug deals, professional women (and occasional men) negotiating clients or other nefarious situations. Of course, after ECPA was passed I never listened to cell phones ever again…
One of the CARMA members retained his analog Motorola Flip-Phone well into the digital transition. The voice clarity on the older wide-band analog portion of the cellular network was infinitely better than the narrow digital system. He wanted to keep that analog phone forever, he would likely still have it now if it still worked. Eventually however the cellular companies switched off the analog channels and it all went to some format of digital.
Being analog however made it easy to listen in on his phone calls. At CARMA meetings he would call his wife, girlfriend or whomever and of course half of us would rush to find his conversation on whatever cellular capable scanner we had with us at the time. It was made even easier as time went on as his was likely the only analog activity in range. He would get mad and ***** and moan but there wasn’t much he could do, as he would have just as likely been doing it to us if the roles were reversed.
I remember fondly seeing a guy in the car ahead of me talking on his cell phone and setting my 2006 to search the cellular inputs until I found him. I might have occasionally pulled up alongside him and accidentally had the volume way too loud causing him to hear himself and having no clue where that was coming from. I am sure there are a ton of stories about fun with cell phones before ECPA and the digital transition.
Alpha Charlie:
We had a member of CARMA who was likely the nicest guy you ever met in your life; we will call him Charlie. If you needed help, he would be the first to offer a hand. He was however kind of a weird dude. He tried so hard to be a part of every activity and there were times when he just was not welcome. We all know someone like this.
There was the time at a club picnic when one of the members took his girlfriend out in the woods for some “alone time” and Charlie was worried they would have gotten lost, and we should go and find them. The others would have to hold him back and tell him that maybe they don’t want to be find, they are having more fun being lost, which was lost on Charlie.
One of the things Charlie would do was to record the state police emergency channel on cassette with a Nite-Logger device that would activate cassette recorders of the day on VOX. In those days the Nite-Logger was a hot accessory, right up there with the Opto toys of the time. One of our friends had an Icom H-16 two-way radio. We had discovered that if you program a channel for RX only on the H16 and its companion U16 UHF radio that it only disabled the RF power amp, it will still transmit on the exciter only, albeit at such low power that it could only be heard a couple dozen feet away. We called this “Super-Secret Low Power Mode” and used it for car-to-car traffic. It worked well as long as you were pretty much tailgating the guy you were talking to.
Our friend went by Charlie’s house and, following the script of the State Police dispatchers, made a fake broadcast about a chase involving Charlie’s vehicle thru his neighborhood. Charlie came running out of his house in a panic looking for his car, which was parked undisturbed in his driveway. Charlie looked around, didn’t see anything, scratched his head a few times and went back inside. Our friend waited a few weeks and did a similar thing, this time while Charlie was at work, about a manhunt in Charlie’s neighborhood. The next day Charlie called a couple of us and asked if we hear about the shooting and manhunt around his home, none of had of course since it didn’t happen. To this day I don’t think Charlie ever figured out what was (or wasn’t) going on in his neighborhood that summer.
Punch & Judy
For several years several CARMA members used a GMRS repeater for chatting about social events and radio stuff. It was also used for some personal communications, actually the whole reason GMRS existed.
One couple in particular used our GMRS system extensively. The husband worked in law enforcement, I don’t recall what the wife did. They would talk many times a day, about the most inane topics imaginable. Imagine the most routine texts we exchange with out families today, that is the kind of stuff they talked about all day long.
“Punch and Judy” would bicker about the most minor of topics. He would say the sky is blue and she would counter with it being grey. He would say “Grey” is spelled with an “E”, she would counter that it was with an “A”. They would argue about who’s turn it was to do the dishes, make dinner, or if it cost a quarter or 25 cents to make a phone call. It got so bad that we had to set up a separate PL tone for them so we didn’t have to listen to them all the time.
