Another interesting show. It was wild in the 1980s because all those calls went out in the clear and the cell companies didn't care to inform their customers about it.
Back in the early 80s I worked on the Saudi Arabia TEP4 contract part of which was the provision of 18K mobile lines. You didn't need fancy aerials to listen in to conversations as car radios picked up the 4th harmonic loud and clear. Ericssons agreed to encrypt the Royal Family mobile network (it was separate from the 18k public network) free of charge. We did a lot of debugging which benefitted Voda prior to the 1985 launch in the UK. #goodolddays
Here in the USA, I seem to recall getting my cellular security group antenna around 1987 or so -- it was around the start of not only the 800 MHz cellular phone services but also here in the United States, 800MHz Land mobile radio services including police communications. 800 MHz was brand new then so Even us radio geeks were not familiar with 800 MHz antenna design. The antenna theory/physics aren't much different than other VHF or UHF antennas. So for a while there, cellular security group made a killing Off of these well made antennas that probably used about a dollar or 2 worth of parts, Until many of us saw how it was simply a standard quarter wave Antenna centered on about 850 MHz -- nothing magic! Then, we either made our own or utilized broad broadband discone antennas, Or even purchased the 3dB or 5dB gain mobile cellular phone antennas and used them for our receivers.
Ahh the good ole days of monitoring cordless phones, baby monitors, clipping diodes to open cellular freqs, and listening to the local McDonalds drive thru radios. Such fun!
There were some analogue mobile phones that could be put into test mode to listen to whatever channel number you dialled in - although you could typically only receive one side of the call (ISTR Tx and Rx were 40MHz or so apart), any call to a landline usually had enough sidetone to hear both people.
Oh wow going down memory lane, I still have a couple of MAX-800 antennas which I used on an Icom IC-R8000 scanner with unlocked mobile bands (800 Mhz) in the US. I also used a Motorola cellphone phone with special test commends to listen to the other side of the convo, even drop the connection by jamming the carrier signal by transmitting on specific frequencies. Oh and also had one of those infamous ESNR-5900 readers (wink-wink), it was a blast till the early 2000's, then pretty much all went digital. heh
I purchased one of these when they first came out. Great little antenna, though the SO239 connector isn't all that great at 800 MHz frequencies. I built several of my own using a brass rod and an SO-239. But it brings back fun memories when scanning was new and exciting. Thanks for sharing!
Back then I was a mobile radio systems engineer and the handheld scanner was an exceptionally useful tool. I carried a declaration from my employers to the effect that the scanner was 'Test Equipment' should I ever have difficulty with US customs in my travels. Only once did a US Officious Customs Operative search my carry on when transiting through LAX, he looked at the AOR scanner asked if it had batteries in (it deliberately did not) and passed me through - but he made me power up the 486 laptop !! As an aside listening to mobile phones was, as others have said, quite boring, on weekends the calls seemed to be between guy's 'walking their dogs' and their mistresses who they were only able to see during the week. Another mobile useless bit of info - the clear down signal on AMPS was a (I think) an 8 kHz tone burst - it was therefore quite easy (with a modified mobile in engineering mode) - to cause havoc by dropping peoples calls.
I remember that AMPS tone burst would precede a hand off between cell sites so it cued me to hit scan to pick up the same call from the next cell site the car had moved through as the call would drop after hearing that tone.
I had an original Max800 in the 1980's and it did work fine. In the US there is and has been extensive use of the 850-870 band for public safety use as well as business and this antenna excelled at that. I lost it years ago in a move and have seen them at hamfests from time to time. The basic construction was simple and easily replicated: An SO239 bulkhead connector with 4 ground plane radials soldered to the lugs and a radiating element to the the center conductor. A short length of stiff RG8 with PL259's at either end and a SO239 to BNC adapter completed the antenna. They added the hard rubber or plastic shroud. I have made my own version using heavy house wire, both in the same 800 MHz. and other ranges, I made a VHF ground plane like this and hung it in my attic, worked great!
The local driving instructress was 'happily' married...so was my milkman...yes...they were getting it on!!! I heard it all...the milkman was paranoid as hell..."i think he knows you know, he keeps following me round the pubs." 🤣🤣🤣 Remember it fondly n knew them both well
Ah! The days of analog cellular! The rule was NEVER turn your phone on near a US airport! If you did, someone would be using you account and start providing long distance service to India!😂
I guess that was more caused by lack of authentication security in those systems. If they were better protected and the analog voice scrambled, they might have lasted a bit longer
@@kreuner11 It may have been an attribute of the system used in the USA... over here, the NMT system was used and while the audio was unprotected, the authentication was reasonably secure for the time. (at least it was in the -2 and -3 versions)
Still have my MAX 800 HH version which was the later model. No coax section and connector up in the housing, just a BNC male on a solid section going straight to the antenna. Analogue phones were quickly taken over by GSM here in the early 90's (gee I wonder why?) so later on my MAX 800 became useful on 800Mhz Motorola Type II trunking or Smartnet as Motorola called it. I had to laugh at the baby monitor dipole, the ad for which I had long forgotten about. Now going to have to dig the crates and find my MAX 800!
In the mid 80s, before cellular phones, there were carphones. They were VHF. If I remember rightly between 160 and 170 MHz. The user called via a mobile operator and you could hear both sides of the call. I was living in Manchester at the time and had a Trio/Kenwood R2000 with the VHF converter. I heard some very interesting conversations!
If you can find really old television with a UHF band option, it can get what is now mobile phones band (channels 70 to 81). I don't know if this type of television ever existed in UK, but there where few made in US. The antenna in this video must have been listening in on NMT-900 and maybe NMT-450. I don't know what other systems where used in UK.
@@petesmith2234 Yes indeed, and it was terrible. I owned an AOR scanner and traded it in at he local hamshop to buy an FRG9600 because it had a dial and more modes (the AOR was keypad only and FM). Bad decision. The front end was too wide and lots of cross modulation.
He was fined for breaking the law by deliberately causing interference to a legal method of communication. Not silly at all if it was your conversation that was being drowned out by the idiot.
Back in the '90s and 2000s a friend was a cellphone tech at [Big Cellphone Company] and he routinely modded the old analog 'phones for "scanning", just for fun. I have to say 99.999 percent of cellphone conversations are incredibly boring, especially when you are only able to hear one side of the conversation. The only really juicy one we heard was when we intercepted the conversation a cheating woman was having with her boyfriend and then we realized she was the wife of one of our other friends. Awkward.
And the laughing police man had a red Ferrari I used to listen to him on cf back in the day he caused mayhem around the country thanks for the vid buddy
I remember the squeaky on GB3CF way back in the 80's. Also often hearing the laughing policeman tune, whether it was the same man or a copy cat I do not know. TBH it was a mystery to me till now.
Thanks RM👍 I have always wondered about that Scanner Antenna ever since seeing it on your Videos ⭐️ That is so Cool. Would love to find one here In Arizona. Thanks again and Take care
IMHO listening to Cellphone wasn't that interesting. In those days most cellphone users were driving around in the car (the rates were much to high for stationary use), so a typical call would have several cell handovers, and by just scanning the cell towers you would not receive full calls but usually only fragments. Also, the audio was usually uni-directional, you would hear one speaker clearly and the other one very weak and muffled. Finally, you would never know who you were going to receive. Much more entertaining was to listen to "cordless phones", the phones that people used in their homes, with a station attached to the fixed line and a handset that could be carried around the house. They operated at 31 or 959 MHz here. (for cheap and more expensive ones) Advantage was that the signal remained throughout the call, and you would hear the same people that were local to your block of houses.
Back in 1990 I worked in a chemical lab overnights. I rigged up an 800MHz antenna on the rooftop of the lab, and ran a line down into our lab break room. We had a scanner in the room that we used to listen to cellphone calls on, and most WERE pretty boring. The occasional cheating spouse though. At home I had a discone antenna mounted above my roofline about 50 feet up. I used to tune into baby monitors and cordless phones for about a quarter-mile range. Now THOSE were interesting! At one point there was a local murder case in the news, and the woman in jail would call her mother (who lived just down the street) on a pay phone from the jail almost every night around the same time while her trial was going on. So, for a few weeks, I got to hear the story progression not only from the TV coverage, but from the conversations with the mother and daughter. Very cool. Back in the late 70s VHF mobile phone calls were easy to listen to, and you heard both sides in the clear. Most people that had them then were wealthy, and had no idea that their calls could be intercepted. So made for some interesting listening. 😎
The "Baby Monitor" Dipole could also be used to listen to home cordless phones, hence the "cordless" part, as most sold in the US used the same frequency range and at the time were unencrypted. I'm not sure about the decision to prominently advertise it for use as a baby monitor antenna as well though... 😖 I guess they really wanted to hone in on the market of creeps that wanted to listen to baby's crying and parents arguing...
This item couldn't be patented because it was an obvious and pre-existing design. And you really don't need anything except an SO239 antenna connector, a brass rod that you can cut to length, and a few screws and nuts. I've made a dozen of these for scanning and ham radio.
Remember as kid had the uniden bearcat scanner and a Realistic brand bye radio shack I had one program for all police and fire. And the other used just let scan and pick up house cordless phones. Some fun times
So... all those video/photos using this antenna on your channel, was it to scan shortwave or something else? (I'm a n00b and presume that an antenna for 800MHz would be crap for shortwave)
Looks like an Aurel GP868 groundplane... these are not very wide. I assume your antenna has only at one point a very good swr. You should post a vna graph. In 1992 I had good results at 930mhz for CT telephone reception with the standard rubber wideband antenna with my aor 1500.
@@RingwayManchester No, but I was one of the victims on GB3CF and other repeaters back in the day. However hilarious some people see that time, it wasn't funny in the least to those of us who were simply trying to have a conversation on the way to work or wherever. I still can't hear the Laughing Policeman song without cringing 😡
that's funny..im a about a hour away from where those antennas were built I just purchased a DPD 800MHZ 7DBI vertical..i can wait to run it on the sds200... de w1cjf
Another interesting show. It was wild in the 1980s because all those calls went out in the clear and the cell companies didn't care to inform their customers about it.
Back in the early 80s I worked on the Saudi Arabia TEP4 contract part of which was the provision of 18K mobile lines. You didn't need fancy aerials to listen in to conversations as car radios picked up the 4th harmonic loud and clear. Ericssons agreed to encrypt the Royal Family mobile network (it was separate from the 18k public network) free of charge. We did a lot of debugging which benefitted Voda prior to the 1985 launch in the UK. #goodolddays
I do believe that it would have been called scrambling, but that's crazy only the royal family got to have it
Here in the USA, I seem to recall getting my cellular security group antenna around 1987 or so -- it was around the start of not only the 800 MHz cellular phone services but also here in the United States, 800MHz Land mobile radio services including police communications. 800 MHz was brand new then so Even us radio geeks were not familiar with 800 MHz antenna design. The antenna theory/physics aren't much different than other VHF or UHF antennas. So for a while there, cellular security group made a killing Off of these well made antennas that probably used about a dollar or 2 worth of parts, Until many of us saw how it was simply a standard quarter wave Antenna centered on about 850 MHz -- nothing magic! Then, we either made our own or utilized broad broadband discone antennas, Or even purchased the 3dB or 5dB gain mobile cellular phone antennas and used them for our receivers.
Ahh the good ole days of monitoring cordless phones, baby monitors, clipping diodes to open cellular freqs, and listening to the local McDonalds drive thru radios. Such fun!
You sound like my buddy in highschool
There were some analogue mobile phones that could be put into test mode to listen to whatever channel number you dialled in - although you could typically only receive one side of the call (ISTR Tx and Rx were 40MHz or so apart), any call to a landline usually had enough sidetone to hear both people.
Oh wow going down memory lane, I still have a couple of MAX-800 antennas which I used on an Icom IC-R8000 scanner with unlocked mobile bands (800 Mhz) in the US. I also used a Motorola cellphone phone with special test commends to listen to the other side of the convo, even drop the connection by jamming the carrier signal by transmitting on specific frequencies. Oh and also had one of those infamous ESNR-5900 readers (wink-wink), it was a blast till the early 2000's, then pretty much all went digital. heh
I purchased one of these when they first came out. Great little antenna, though the SO239 connector isn't all that great at 800 MHz frequencies. I built several of my own using a brass rod and an SO-239. But it brings back fun memories when scanning was new and exciting. Thanks for sharing!
I still have two MAX-800 antennas from the early 90's with BNC connectors, which attached/detached on scanners quickly by half a turn.
Back then I was a mobile radio systems engineer and the handheld scanner was an exceptionally useful tool. I carried a declaration from my employers to the effect that the scanner was 'Test Equipment' should I ever have difficulty with US customs in my travels. Only once did a US Officious Customs Operative search my carry on when transiting through LAX, he looked at the AOR scanner asked if it had batteries in (it deliberately did not) and passed me through - but he made me power up the 486 laptop !!
As an aside listening to mobile phones was, as others have said, quite boring, on weekends the calls seemed to be between guy's 'walking their dogs' and their mistresses who they were only able to see during the week.
Another mobile useless bit of info - the clear down signal on AMPS was a (I think) an 8 kHz tone burst - it was therefore quite easy (with a modified mobile in engineering mode) - to cause havoc by dropping peoples calls.
I remember that AMPS tone burst would precede a hand off between cell sites so it cued me to hit scan to pick up the same call from the next cell site the car had moved through as the call would drop after hearing that tone.
I had an original Max800 in the 1980's and it did work fine. In the US there is and has been extensive use of the 850-870 band for public safety use as well as business and this antenna excelled at that. I lost it years ago in a move and have seen them at hamfests from time to time. The basic construction was simple and easily replicated: An SO239 bulkhead connector with 4 ground plane radials soldered to the lugs and a radiating element to the the center conductor. A short length of stiff RG8 with PL259's at either end and a SO239 to BNC adapter completed the antenna. They added the hard rubber or plastic shroud. I have made my own version using heavy house wire, both in the same 800 MHz. and other ranges, I made a VHF ground plane like this and hung it in my attic, worked great!
The local driving instructress was 'happily' married...so was my milkman...yes...they were getting it on!!! I heard it all...the milkman was paranoid as hell..."i think he knows you know, he keeps following me round the pubs." 🤣🤣🤣 Remember it fondly n knew them both well
Ah! The days of analog cellular! The rule was NEVER turn your phone on near a US airport! If you did, someone would be using you account and start providing long distance service to India!😂
I guess that was more caused by lack of authentication security in those systems. If they were better protected and the analog voice scrambled, they might have lasted a bit longer
@@kreuner11 It may have been an attribute of the system used in the USA... over here, the NMT system was used and while the audio was unprotected, the authentication was reasonably secure for the time. (at least it was in the -2 and -3 versions)
that look like a miniature version of my old radioshack discone antenna wich i like to call a christmas tree
Still have my MAX 800 HH version which was the later model.
No coax section and connector up in the housing, just a BNC male on a solid section going straight to the antenna.
Analogue phones were quickly taken over by GSM here in the early 90's (gee I wonder why?) so later on my MAX 800 became useful on 800Mhz Motorola Type II trunking or Smartnet as Motorola called it.
I had to laugh at the baby monitor dipole, the ad for which I had long forgotten about.
Now going to have to dig the crates and find my MAX 800!
Adam could you email me pics?!
@@RingwayManchester Just have to locate it first!
In the mid 80s, before cellular phones, there were carphones. They were VHF. If I remember rightly between 160 and 170 MHz. The user called via a mobile operator and you could hear both sides of the call. I was living in Manchester at the time and had a Trio/Kenwood R2000 with the VHF converter. I heard some very interesting conversations!
If you can find really old television with a UHF band option, it can get what is now mobile phones band (channels 70 to 81). I don't know if this type of television ever existed in UK, but there where few made in US. The antenna in this video must have been listening in on NMT-900 and maybe NMT-450. I don't know what other systems where used in UK.
The lowest it gets in Poland are the LTE800 networks
I remember uhf tv.
@@thetravi1348 said " I remember uhf tv. "
Do you remember the movie UHF ?
The Yaesu FRG9600 scanner actually used a multi band TV tuner (made by Sharp if I remember correctly) for the front end/vco.
@@petesmith2234 Yes indeed, and it was terrible. I owned an AOR scanner and traded it in at he local hamshop to buy an FRG9600 because it had a dial and more modes (the AOR was keypad only and FM).
Bad decision. The front end was too wide and lots of cross modulation.
Being fined for talking in a silly voice is the most British thing I've heard of in a while.
Talking in a silly voice while doing a silly walk is subject to imprisonment 🤣🤣🤣🤣
He was fined for breaking the law by deliberately causing interference to a legal method of communication. Not silly at all if it was your conversation that was being drowned out by the idiot.
@@TestGearJunkie. You should be fined for being a party pooper.
@@RCAvhstape Ok, whatever. As they say up here north of the border, "Awa' an bile yer heid."
Back in the '90s and 2000s a friend was a cellphone tech at [Big Cellphone Company] and he routinely modded the old analog 'phones for "scanning", just for fun. I have to say 99.999 percent of cellphone conversations are incredibly boring, especially when you are only able to hear one side of the conversation. The only really juicy one we heard was when we intercepted the conversation a cheating woman was having with her boyfriend and then we realized she was the wife of one of our other friends. Awkward.
And the laughing police man had a red Ferrari I used to listen to him on cf back in the day he caused mayhem around the country thanks for the vid buddy
I remember the squeaky on GB3CF way back in the 80's. Also often hearing the laughing policeman tune, whether it was the same man or a copy cat I do not know. TBH it was a mystery to me till now.
G1MTT, the guy featured in the clip was the man guy , but there was also many copy cats , including G7KCX
Thanks RM👍 I have always wondered about that Scanner Antenna ever since seeing it on your Videos ⭐️ That is so Cool. Would love to find one here In Arizona. Thanks again and Take care
IMHO listening to Cellphone wasn't that interesting. In those days most cellphone users were driving around in the car (the rates were much to high for stationary use), so a typical call would have several cell handovers, and by just scanning the cell towers you would not receive full calls but usually only fragments.
Also, the audio was usually uni-directional, you would hear one speaker clearly and the other one very weak and muffled.
Finally, you would never know who you were going to receive.
Much more entertaining was to listen to "cordless phones", the phones that people used in their homes, with a station attached to the fixed line and a handset that could be carried around the house. They operated at 31 or 959 MHz here. (for cheap and more expensive ones)
Advantage was that the signal remained throughout the call, and you would hear the same people that were local to your block of houses.
Back in 1990 I worked in a chemical lab overnights. I rigged up an 800MHz antenna on the rooftop of the lab, and ran a line down into our lab break room. We had a scanner in the room that we used to listen to cellphone calls on, and most WERE pretty boring. The occasional cheating spouse though.
At home I had a discone antenna mounted above my roofline about 50 feet up. I used to tune into baby monitors and cordless phones for about a quarter-mile range. Now THOSE were interesting! At one point there was a local murder case in the news, and the woman in jail would call her mother (who lived just down the street) on a pay phone from the jail almost every night around the same time while her trial was going on. So, for a few weeks, I got to hear the story progression not only from the TV coverage, but from the conversations with the mother and daughter. Very cool.
Back in the late 70s VHF mobile phone calls were easy to listen to, and you heard both sides in the clear. Most people that had them then were wealthy, and had no idea that their calls could be intercepted. So made for some interesting listening. 😎
I used to hear both ends all the time and landline
I had a discone made of dollar store coat hangers and a gre down converter for cellphone reception.
The "Baby Monitor" Dipole could also be used to listen to home cordless phones, hence the "cordless" part, as most sold in the US used the same frequency range and at the time were unencrypted. I'm not sure about the decision to prominently advertise it for use as a baby monitor antenna as well though... 😖
I guess they really wanted to hone in on the market of creeps that wanted to listen to baby's crying and parents arguing...
Nice, there is quite a sales margin on what can be built from a piece of RG213 or LMR400 and 2 cloth hangers
Don't forget the plastic pipe end cap.
You could also get a copy of the patents and recreate the antenna.
This item couldn't be patented because it was an obvious and pre-existing design. And you really don't need anything except an SO239 antenna connector, a brass rod that you can cut to length, and a few screws and nuts. I've made a dozen of these for scanning and ham radio.
Lots of stuff had Patent Applied For / Patent Pending and there was no attempt to get one. The white center section seems to be a PVC pipe cap.
Maybe do a video on the NSA WATERWITCH i think that was a hand held device with a antenna for eavesdropping on mobile phones.
Remember as kid had the uniden bearcat scanner and a Realistic brand bye radio shack I had one program for all police and fire. And the other used just let scan and pick up house cordless phones. Some fun times
Your next challenge to get hold of the same model of handheld scanner.
Can you do a video on fractal antennas there quite interesting looking.
So... all those video/photos using this antenna on your channel, was it to scan shortwave or something else? (I'm a n00b and presume that an antenna for 800MHz would be crap for shortwave)
the inflation numbers are amazing,it's probably higher since it undercounts the price of everyday goods and especially the price of energy
Prices have been dropping and salaries increased
@RingwayManchester >>> Great video...👍
I remember the LPWS on BM, MH and CF repeaters ...I wonder where they are now 🤔
Drop me an email, I’ll give you some info
Time 102 to 106
The ministry of silly voices. . . and now for something, completely different. . . . .
Ran one years ago on uniden unit 😂
Looks like an Aurel GP868 groundplane... these are not very wide. I assume your antenna has only at one point a very good swr. You should post a vna graph.
In 1992 I had good results at 930mhz for CT telephone reception with the standard rubber wideband antenna with my aor 1500.
I guess this would help find out if your neighbor was plotting against you but most phone calls are pretty boring. If I had one I'd still be curious.
is any one selling these today anywhere
just a somple groundplane. Easy enough tp build one ona BNC panel socket.
Is it me or are all of these companies start in the plumbing department at the hardware store? The top piece looks like a 2 inch pvc pipe cap 🙂
I think that’s exactly how it started and they ended up selling a bunch
Oki 900 owners know
No Amazon link?😂
👏👏👏👏👍
How to break your bnc connection i think 😳😳😳
2.1dBi = 0dBd so no gain!
LPWS strikes again 😂
Yo I'm sniping videos today
What?
@@tonysolar284 I hit like 3 videos inna row within a minute of them being uploaded
Noice. @@panipu
G1MTT. Hmmm, not someone I'd call a friend.
Do you know him?
@@RingwayManchester No, but I was one of the victims on GB3CF and other repeaters back in the day. However hilarious some people see that time, it wasn't funny in the least to those of us who were simply trying to have a conversation on the way to work or wherever. I still can't hear the Laughing Policeman song without cringing 😡
that's funny..im a about a hour away from where those antennas were built I just purchased a DPD 800MHZ 7DBI vertical..i can wait to run it on the sds200... de w1cjf