It should be noted that TETRA encryption was broken in 2022. The findings were released in 2023 to allow for updates to occur. How many TETRA users have updated?
Yes but that’s not the same tetra that the police use. It’s very different and has not been cracked. This is a common misconception that people constantly spread around. I’ll pin this mark purely to educate people reading.
@@MarkRose1337 TETRA has four encoding algorithms available to secure data over the radio network. They use 80-bit keys to perform the encoding. One of the four algorithms, TEA1, is vulnerable to cracking because it only uses 32 of the 80 key bits. (Supposedly to comply with export restrictions.)
to me, the idea of being jailed for listening to public broadcasts, using no encryption whatsoever, is crazy. I, as an amatuer radio operator, have an SDR - I can see on a waterfall all the different transmissions taking place, and listen in. I can even set it up to listen to unencrypted P25 transmissions. All of this completely legally (listening is legal even without a ham radio license here). if you dont want people to listen, encrypt your shit. Hams aren't allowed to encrypt our transmissions, but the police certainly are.
Legality here in the US is due to the 1934 Communications Act, which established that the airwaves are public property, and information transmitted over them does not inherently assume privacy. kd9oam
The police need to practice betters OPSEC. Anyone who uses unencrypted communications should assume that people will listen. Making a "law" to stop it is just just stupid.
Not at all. You get secure comms and then the law permits you to punish those who try to break it. Also if you transmit in the clear you can lock up anyone who records it and then circulates the information they broke the law getting. It won't stop people but it will punish those who need to be punished....which is EVERYONE listening to ANYTHING the police and I are discussing.
@@occamraiser They didn't outlaw breaking the encryption, though; they made it illegal to listen to _any_ radio broadcast communications without permission. It's also illegal to listen to air traffic control transmissions for the same reason.
Actually it DANGEROUSLY stupid!! The way to REALLY get into trouble is to assume that communication is private when it actually isn’t. In that situation nobody assumes that anyone could be listening so they speak freely. It’s actually really quite sad that the people who broke the enigma don’t quite grasp the simply vast hazards that a clever opponent in a cryptography battle might present.
I installed the Tetra/Airwave equipment to Police vehicles at Wiltshire Police and also Gwent Police back when it was rolled out. A lot of the kit was integrated with the existing VHF/Analogue equipment. The unmarked/covert vehicles were the most interesting to work on.
I remember stumbling across local police radio comunications as a child in the early-'80s, while fiddling around with a very ordinary old portable radio, no fancy scanner. It could tune just far enough past the end of the normal radio broadcasting range.
Some of the BEST listening was Cordless Phones. There were 11 frequencies and I had all 11 programmed in my scanner. I knew more about my neighbors than they knew about themselves. I even listened to a girl and her boyfriend having “Phone Sex.” I lived in the middle of a big Mobilehome park and had an outside antenna. The calls were loud and clear and Endless..
@@davepersich3035 I used to hear them and few other bits on old 1950s radiogram radio It might've been older than 50s but I was literally a kid of ABT 10 at my aunties house she had this thing that looked like organ played at Blackpool ballroom in her living room and it picked taxis aircraft and odd police or maybe it was security my memories kinda vague of it .
They don't want you hearing broadcasts like- "Subject seems to be thinking illegal thoughts. We are investigating their apparent innocent behaviour as a deception to conceal unacceptable opinions".
Radio scanners are not illegal in the US, this is due to the 1934 Communications Act, which established that the airwaves are public property, and information transmitted over them does not inherently assume privacy.
Some states will not allow them in vehicles. At home you are free to listen as you please as long as you do not reveal privy bits to the public or use the information for illegal dealings.
It wasn't entirely negative, to put it mildly. The more troubling aspect was the growing familiarity with the same cars and individuals reappearing at various significant jobs/calls, particularly during the night. In the past, the UK radio system could be easily accessed using an ordinary home radio, provided it had a wide enough bandwidth tuner. This meant that seemingly anyone could listen in without needing specialised equipment. However, over time, this casual accessibility transitioned into something more nefarious. Picture this: at around 2 a.m., you find yourself stopping a vehicle that raises immediate suspicions. Inside, there are four occupants, all of whom seem overly attentive and anxious, and the boot is crammed full of gear meant for a break-in. As you approach the car, you can’t help but notice that the scanner is tuned to the local police station's frequency. These individuals are not merely reckless; they are highly aware of the police patterns. They understand that during the night shift, especially in the early hours, a significant number of officers from the evening shift will be closing their shifts, resulting in a skeleton crew patrolling the town, city, or sector. Recognizing this vulnerability, they sometimes call 999 to report a fictitious, large-scale incident elsewhere, knowing full well that this tactic would draw the available police units to that specific area. This diversion provides them with a window of opportunity, allowing them to operate with a sense of security, fully aware that it could take up to 10 minutes-or even longer-for police to respond to a silent alarm at the premises they are targeting for burglary. In the UK, there's a strict legal framework surrounding the use of radio equipment. To operate certain types of radio equipment, one must possess a valid license. Unauthorised listening to emergency service communications is a criminal offence. Therefore, if you discover a scanner hidden in a car during a stop, it typically serves as a strong indicator that the occupants are engaged in illicit activities and are likely up to no good.
MP's "we need to access every persons every communication to fight fake terrorism." Also MP's - "not OUR communications and we want a Stasi like police so their comms are also secret."
The problem with pretty much all early encryption systems is that they involved some sort of inversion and/or frequency translation. When that’s fed through a radio with limited audio bandwidth, what would normally be rolling off at 300Hz and 3KHz then translates to a hole in the audio pass band. With MASC, that hole keeps moving around, which sounds odd. Add to that, many UK police systems were quasi sync with with the bandwidth limited even further to aid equalisation it sounds even worse.
Several of the photos of aerial arrays on the top of cars aren’t for radio communication, they’re “Tracker” aerials fitted at the expense of “Tracker” to home-in on stolen vehicles
Loads of hours of listening to 452.425mhz nfm (Avon and Somerset constabulary)during the 90's. Brilliant! friday and weekend entertainment, way better than Eastenders anyway 😂
@SamFinch-bn8kr One of those 452.xxxx MHz Quantars from The Met is in operation to this day in San Francisco as one of our network's main ham repeaters (though IIRC it's on its 3rd power supply...)
Every now and then, you would hear one of your friends/associates pop up on the scanner for petty stuff. So it was my duty to ring my friends (on my Nokia 5110) and give them a heads up lol. We were only young teens at the time and withen a few years we grew out of them shenanigans 😄
The good old days and you had the delay set to hear the reply .Also cordless phones baby monitors picking up the neighbours talking about each other i knew everything that was happening in my area .
I do remember in the 90s, but a judge ruled. It wasn’t illegal to own all listen to the police, but it was illegal to act on information received or using them with intent to commit crimes The law was changed after this this was a loophole in the law that her lawyer found while defending someone who was being prosecuted for it The law was then strengthened
West Yoekshire, especially Leeds, MASC was installed on all units. I was lucky as i was one of the few civilians not working for the police to be allocated a radio and callsign.
Remember not long ago seeing an officer switch from his radio to cell phone during a situation in progress. Not certian what was up, but figure it was of priority to not be disclosed over the airwaves..about three squad cars involved.
@RT-qd8yl Same. I was a volunteer firefighter for many years, and I used to see it all the time during normal police work. It's simple and effective in keeping sensitive information off the airwaves.
Man when I was a kid I knew of a group of dudes that were trying to plan a hiest. And part of there plan was taking out the police radio towers. And then multiple people were gonna hit jewelery stores and banks. We have wild imaginations when ur a kid lol
The ham radio operators need to point out that they are often the people detecting criminal broadcasts and they should approach it as a civil defense force
Most amateur equipment could be extended on TX / RX. I did this to a Kenwood TH42e in 1994. It was a handy radio to have, Kenwood dual band were also good.
I judge a police force's credibility based upon their behavior in issues like this. If the dispatch channel is open, they get high marks for transparency. If they encrypt everything, and do not present audio on delay, I get very suspicious of anything they do. Ultimately the police are public servants and we deserve to know how our taxes are being used. No, I'm not going to take their word for it. Banning scanners is a very sick sign. I wonder what they'll do if the public figures out how to decrypt these radios with SDR software. Good luck banning SDRs...
From 2004 it was no longer possible in the Netherlands to listen to the Police and other emergency services via the scanner, With the arrival of C2000.
Now that the line between 'criminal audience' and 'criminal actors' is so grey perhaps a bit of surveillance is not only warranted but essential. Who watches the watchers?
I visited the Maine State Police a while back was shown the comms centre, given a list of their troop area, frequency lists and 10 codes. Here In Blighty I was busted for having a converted Burndept the one with the yellow button on top.
Really, I used to buy surplus ones from police to put on 70cm! The burndept still has the Home Office 9v batteries. They had 3 terminals do they could never be installed the wrong way!
at the same period I printed (RTTY hacked Teletype 50 bits/s !) messages from the District Bureau (Prefecture) which were sent in clear on +/- 86Mhz, received on regular FM receiver (WFM) at the low limit of the commercial band. They conveyed sensible informations on recruiting employes (CV) and even more, movements of trucks transporting radioactive dumps (!) giving complete itinerary and the place where the trucks stayed during the WE (!). My neighbours complained of the continuous noise of the Teletype!. Happy days...
In NZ the Nz Police AOS (Armed Offenders Squad) went early digital, of sorts, here in about 1995 after the media were listening to them and their operations and were turning up filming the unfolding drama. They thought they'd put a stop to cameras turning up so they introduced a "scrambler" on their simplex AOS frequency which was an audio scrambler. However it still produced a carrier so DF loops were used to find the strong signal and media still turned up ! What they also did not realize was that when they went to cellphones to talk about something sensitive, back then, cellphones were analogue so it was really easy to listen in to their conversation. So cameras still turned up ! Nowdays P25 and digitial mobile phones have put a complete stop to eavesdropping but social media sites are now used to see whats happening around the place sometimes thats very hit or miss. Once upon a time I was a news camera person. New Zealand has only encrypted the three main cities so far mainly because of the cost and the remoteness of upgrading rural sites.Analogue radio sites use a lot less power thatn a digital site.
@@RT-qd8yl They just considered cameras not important. The use of the word obstruction and arrest was threatened frequently if we did not go away or stop filming when they demanded. The old "filming in a public place" argument alweays came up.
This. So many people on here seem convinced that encrypting comms immediately equals corruption. There are plenty of good reasons to encrypt, and keeping people from interfering with an active scene is one of them. The idea that an entire police force is corrupt, while possible, seems less likely than a group of corrupt officers within a department. Therefore, broadcasting corrupt activity to an entire department over encrypted comms seems dangerous and impractical if you're engaged in corruption. If you're being corrupt, wouldn't it make more sense to keep the corrupt communication limited to the smallest possible number of people possible by using mobile phones? I don't buy this notion that encrypting radio traffic makes corruption more likely.
@@Dwigt_Rortugal More lazy, or abusing power. Open comms allow civilian / community oversight committees to know when they are underreporting stuff, or similar.
The pettiness of unionised staff never ceased to amaze me, one tri-service comms centre for Airwave I heard about had to be built with three entrances so that the police, fire and ambulance staff could have their 'own' entrance into the centre.
The problem with airwave was that streaming data, like pictures or videos, was impossible even with the new teds2 upgrade. That's why you pretty much see officers carrying mobile phones as well. Tetra or airwave, as it is known in the UK, was relatively secure until the encryption was indeed broken. I am amazed that it is taking so long for its replacement. But to be honest, what do I know. I wish everyone a merry Christmas and a happy New Year...
Algorithm recommended me this vid, very cool, very informative, I've always wondered how the UK handled police scanners as I'm not old enough to remember the 90s all that well 😂
In North America, law enforcement uses the propriatory Tim Horton radio system called "Deployment of Operational Networks for Urgent Transmissions" or "DONUT"
The Tim Hortons protocols are only used in Canada, eh. Here in the States, troopers are linked to the Digital Uniform Notoriety and Knowldge Network, or DUNKN.
In Northern Maine, they tried the DONUT protocol, but no matter how hard they tried to get it right, it just wasn't the same as north of the border. Unrelated, I saw a Tim Hortons in Bangkok, of all places. We laughed, as there were two motorcycle cops stopped there.
This reminds me of something I heard around 1995: Police responding to an alarm sounding at a business. They couldn't see any signs of forced entry, but there was a door with a combination lock, so they radio the control room, and are told the combination. They enter and check things out and find nothing suspicious, so they lock up and leave. Later that night, the place was burgled - entry via that same door - using the correct combination ! :D
In the US where many consider monitoring the police a form of transparency a proposal has been made whereby police transmissions are encrypted but a delayed version is broadcast unencrypted. I'm not really sure that makes sense though because if they wanted something hidden there would no doubt be a "malfunction" in the retransmission.
The 4 aerials shown at 07:15 are actually Tracker signal direction finders pick up the pings from activated tracker units and give a rough location of the stolen car.
What comes to mind is a room somewhere in Langley Virginia, with numerous individuals, and a plethora of equipment designed to hack such encrypted systems.
Have you seriously ever considered biding all your radio history kmowledge and content into a well structured documentary? I find this content so interesting. Most times I just listen to it and enjoy the stories and radio stuff in them. Cheers from Panama. Happy holidays.
@@RingwayManchester happy to help with the effort if you do decide to pursuit it. Your channel has the unique value of adding history and context to radio, and not just tech stuff.
Here most of responders are using TETRA (except some of volunteer fire brigades). You can still listen to railway communication (and if you are malicious you can even stop all the trains around, but they better never find you). This vulnerability is slowly comint to an end, so only disaster response will use analog communication, especially because HAM operators are encouraged by law to help in such cases (of course if their equipment is functional)
There was a period ( early 90's) where encrypted radios were only issued to specialist groups while response officers radios were still unencrypted, I can remember being involved supporting an operation by such a unit and we used Cougar encrypted radios but they were just back to back in operation, no assistance from any repeaters so range was very limited.
We used to do it as kids back in the 70s. In those days, I think you got the Police on VHF. I found it boring, but I think a lot of kids thought it was edgy and daring.
Police Coms in Australia have been encrypted for a decade at least. You can still listen to Fire, Ambulance and State Emergency Services, they use trunked systems, but they are not encrypted.
@@TomSherwood-z5l They were here too. The original GRN (Govt Radio Network Trunked system) included all emergency services, but Police went to an encrypted version.
MASC, what fun to use...some slight added benefits in that it also gave the radio ID so you knew who was calling, the emergency button and the remote stun ability that we didn't have before. Had a great ICCS DS1000 system made that was one of the few systems that was ahead of its time.
My Mum used to go to bed with a really rudimentary airband radio and "listen to the police messages". Like another commenter above said it was a city wide hobby in Bristol in the 90s as they dealt with nightly joy riders- which in my parents' case ended up one night with my mum listening to a chase which ended up with a stolen car crashing into our front garden! Ps I have very little interest in radio as a hobby but also watch your content religiously and have done for years!
The police in my area only switched to MASC when they needed to pass sensitive info. This was commanded by the control operators, to switch every user on the channel into MASC. But if not every radio received the command, they had a split network where some users were locked out. If the operators failed to get everyone into MASC mode after a couple of attempts, they would give up and just pass the traffic in the clear. Over a period of time the operators lost confidence in the system and just stopped using it. When mobile phones got cheaper and started to be issues to police, they would just ask them to ring in to pass the sensitive info. I recently heard of some people who used to monitor the police using PMR radios, who also had the output freqs programmed in for transmit. And they would transmit over the channel when they heard the data bursts used to command MASC, so jamming the channel locally to them. Stopping some users radios from going onto MASC mode, allowing them to continue to eavesdrop.
The TETRA system was commissioned using drive testing by ROSCOM of Derby and I worked on the project for 2 years, effectively a 2y driving holiday with 2 x TETRA sets in the car automatically communicating with an identical pair of sets, all equipped with automatic call generators and recording kit.
Police in my city used Motorola Sabers equipped with DVP (Digital Voice Protection) which were in use by certain squads. Certain channels were DVP only through repeaters to maintain decent range across most of the city. General duties were in the clear on analogue conventional UHF until 2006 when they switched on the P25 trunked network and encrypted ALL Police talkgroups (AES256). With some of the nasty people around these days, I am glad that the radio network is secure.
Muggleton Road, Amesbury, Wiltshire. Police "TETRA Radio" removed from Flat within Evidence Bag, 2018. No explanation via Authorities. Images available on line.
When I was a kid in the 1960s you could just tune an ordinary domestic FM (VHF) radio to the upper end of the band and listen in to the police. Earlier radios had only gone up to around 100 MHz, but later ones went up to around 108 MHz, and that included some of the police frequencies. I think the official line was you were not supposed to tune in, but many people had radios that could pick up those frequencies!
I have a hunch that Cobra bought out Whistler. Their already selling re-labeled radar detectors. The Cobra 700i for example. I think Whistler should have stuck with the radar detector, laser jammer markets. They bought out GRE Com. for the police scanner line. Uniden sells pre programmed digital scanners. With the option to purchase encryption keys separately or as a group. They also sell updated preloaded sim cards for their scanners.
I think things will stay the same, listen as much as you want, but don't allow any USE of anything you hear. That includes admitting you heard anything.
Got to say, I was being watched in about 1992, the scanner told me. "Mike 1 to Foxtrot, he's left the premises, going the usual route" well, there you go. Worth the £350 or whatever it was.
Exactly! Why would you not be proud of your law officers and their service? Are there really that many criminals listening in? They make it sound like half the country are convicts!
My Parents had a second hand stereo and it was possible to listen to several emergency wave lengths including the police you could only hear one side but it was boating and we never bothered to listen.
Those crimes happen against people the state views somewhere between "useful as a piggy bank" and an enemy. We all have seen how they've shifted from policing crimes to policing protest.
Comment: the PFX MASC had an extended front, because there was no room in the radio for the crypto module..The software based MASC PRP radios were used in ireland, never saw one in the UK. you show cars equiped with the four VHF quarter wave antennas that were for tracking the old expensive TRACKER anti theft system in cars. (LO-JACK in the USA.)
True story…….I got caught in about 1993 with a handheld radio scanner in the car. We got pulled over for a stop check and my mate in the passenger seat was too slow hiding it under the seat……..got a court summons, ended up with a conditional discharge and scanner confiscated. We wasn’t even doing anything wrong with it, just nosey to see what was going on 😂
In the 1970s you knew you had found the police band in my home in Coventry. You knew you had hit it because of the Beep, Beep, Beep, then an operator talking. Later in the early 90’s when I joined the police, I was surprised by how unbothered the senior officers were by the fact people were listening. In the nick where I was based, the local criminals would know how many cars were back in on refs during the night shift based on the times they heard us asking for the main automatic gates into the rear of the station to be opened when coming back to the station. After that, each shift would be creative in using all sorts of codewords back to the controller in the station such as “Betsy, heavens or doom”. It was only after you caught one or two of the burglars who were breaking into the local Woolworths, Shoe shops or other shops because they'd sit in the back of the car laughing at us telling us they had worked out the codewords we were using to open the station carpark gates. When the first Airwaves units were introduced, it was a big seachange. Before the local control in your station was able to send out one message if an urgent job came in. We all struggled with the silence at first until the first changes were made allowing you to hear what was going on in the town by the broadcast feature. Sadly, all the local control rooms were closed in favour of everything coming from HQ, losing the local knowledge as the operators became civvies permanently based in the South of the county. The other issue we had was the old Motorola HT’s (2:37) were nice and heavy and if in your hand you could clonk someone scrapping with you with it. The Airwaves were only as heavy as a mobile phone. They were not as robust as the Motorola and if you ended up in a scrap on the ground in the town centre on a Saturday night, they broke. This resulted in a mountain of paperwork and bollocking by the duty Inspector.
People should be allowed to listen to the police chatter, especially when the police are so politicized and anti-native. In the USA, I can listen to police/fire/ambulance on "Broadcastify" if someone is feeding the scanner take to the webpage.
I miss the 90s me and my pals in my shed listening to Helter skelter and dreamscape tapes or getting out the scanner had some not so legal fun with those
When it comes to comms there will be different levels of security due to cost and complexity and preventing serious organised crime is a higher priority than securing against threats from state level actors except for the Security Services.
Burglars don't need the radios as the Police will not be turning up. I believe it is the Auditors that the Police are scared of, it is those dreaded cameras. They film you but do not like being filmed back.
Ultimately the police want be able to arrest people who think about committing crimes. 🤔 Let that thought sink in, but not for too long, it could be an arrestable offence soon! 😉
You could do a whole lot worse. A whole lot worse. Most of us have no idea what it's like to live in a true police state and we take for granted what we have. Yes, hold the police accountable and enforce anti-corruption with truly proportionate punishment for corruption. Wherever there are humans with authority or power, we're pretty much guaranteed to have corruption unless there are robust measures to deal with and deter it.
@@RingwayManchesteri worked on the Cougar VHF radio in the mid80s. 16kbit/s CVSD voice coding was much easier to encrypt than the earlier analog systems
Started off as dolphin radios as i was using 1 in 2000 when i was driving taxis could clear anywhere in the uk np and drive back to base still talking to the boss.
Heard my mate being chased in a Rover 3500 in the 90s. It was his scanner, he'd gone up the shop for beer and left it at mine. Literally 10 minutes later Surrey police are giving a running comentary 😂
@occamraiser It was HIS car and it was the 90s. No I haven't, but you seem to have all the knowledge of that. Have you? Dypshyte! Then again, I doubt you've spent much time away from mummies spare room PC watching pawn (intentional) while we have fun. Picking your nose and whatever else!!
It should be noted that TETRA encryption was broken in 2022. The findings were released in 2023 to allow for updates to occur. How many TETRA users have updated?
Yes but that’s not the same tetra that the police use. It’s very different and has not been cracked. This is a common misconception that people constantly spread around. I’ll pin this mark purely to educate people reading.
@@RingwayManchester I was unaware there were different systems called tetra!
Wh at
@@MarkRose1337 TETRA has four encoding algorithms available to secure data over the radio network. They use 80-bit keys to perform the encoding. One of the four algorithms, TEA1, is vulnerable to cracking because it only uses 32 of the 80 key bits. (Supposedly to comply with export restrictions.)
@@MarkRose1337 yeah, Tetra and Tetrapol are completely different systems, even modulation is different
to me, the idea of being jailed for listening to public broadcasts, using no encryption whatsoever, is crazy. I, as an amatuer radio operator, have an SDR - I can see on a waterfall all the different transmissions taking place, and listen in. I can even set it up to listen to unencrypted P25 transmissions. All of this completely legally (listening is legal even without a ham radio license here).
if you dont want people to listen, encrypt your shit. Hams aren't allowed to encrypt our transmissions, but the police certainly are.
Legality here in the US is due to the 1934 Communications Act, which established that the airwaves are public property, and information transmitted over them does not inherently assume privacy. kd9oam
I think in the UK acting on the information was the actual crime rather than just eavesdropping..
Nope, check the law, it’s always been the same. No listening to anything not intended for your reception
The police are afraid of too much surveillance from the public? 😮😂
Because only the police have the exclusive right to engage in mass surveillance, such as CCTV cameras fitted inside council houses 😂 😂 😂
The police need to practice betters OPSEC. Anyone who uses unencrypted communications should assume that people will listen. Making a "law" to stop it is just just stupid.
Not at all. You get secure comms and then the law permits you to punish those who try to break it. Also if you transmit in the clear you can lock up anyone who records it and then circulates the information they broke the law getting.
It won't stop people but it will punish those who need to be punished....which is EVERYONE listening to ANYTHING the police and I are discussing.
It’s electro magnetic radiation what are you talking about if it’s unencrypted it’s public
@@occamraiser They didn't outlaw breaking the encryption, though; they made it illegal to listen to _any_ radio broadcast communications without permission. It's also illegal to listen to air traffic control transmissions for the same reason.
Actually it DANGEROUSLY stupid!! The way to REALLY get into trouble is to assume that communication is private when it actually isn’t. In that situation nobody assumes that anyone could be listening so they speak freely. It’s actually really quite sad that the people who broke the enigma don’t quite grasp the simply vast hazards that a clever opponent in a cryptography battle might present.
But that makes to much sense!
Lucky they didn't get their radios from the IDF.
That's not luck
Unlucky you mean, for all fans of roast pork
They do not have any hips to grind with the UK.
Business was booming for a while, but demand has dwindled.
I installed the Tetra/Airwave equipment to Police vehicles at Wiltshire Police and also Gwent Police back when it was rolled out.
A lot of the kit was integrated with the existing VHF/Analogue equipment. The unmarked/covert vehicles were the most interesting to work on.
Many hours of entertainmernt in the 90's listening to Nottingham Police lol
Same with Kent police. Helped when hwe worked out the codewords for the towns, although when the coppers got excited, that went out of the window.
In my opinion, Liverpool has never needed encryption as they're impossible to understand in the clear...
uhh, the famed for theiving locals can understand
Yep. The Home Office turned down the application for Merseyside Police radios to come with subtitles.
😂
It should be simple… Liverpool cops should be Scottish, London cops should be Brummies and vice versa. No need to use expensive scrambling lol.
I remember stumbling across local police radio comunications as a child in the early-'80s, while fiddling around with a very ordinary old portable radio, no fancy scanner. It could tune just far enough past the end of the normal radio broadcasting range.
I used to do the same, found them at the top end of the VHF frequency.
Some of the BEST listening was Cordless Phones. There were 11 frequencies and I had all 11 programmed in my scanner. I knew more about my neighbors than they knew about themselves. I even listened to a girl and her boyfriend having “Phone Sex.” I lived in the middle of a big Mobilehome park and had an outside antenna. The calls were loud and clear and Endless..
@@davepersich3035
I used to hear them and few other bits on old 1950s radiogram radio
It might've been older than 50s but I was literally a kid of ABT 10 at my aunties house she had this thing that looked like organ played at Blackpool ballroom in her living room and it picked taxis aircraft and odd police or maybe it was security my memories kinda vague of it .
They don't want you hearing broadcasts like- "Subject seems to be thinking illegal thoughts. We are investigating their apparent innocent behaviour as a deception to conceal unacceptable opinions".
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
The public really needs to whip a little attitude adjustment on Big Brother to stop this nonsense about radio scanning!!!
People should be able to listen and watch the police to make sure THEY are not up to no good
Radio scanners are not illegal in the US, this is due to the 1934 Communications Act, which established that the airwaves are public property, and information transmitted over them does not inherently assume privacy.
Britain is a socialist country there’s no freedom of anything there
Of course it turned out the biggest thieves of the lot were Macquarie and Motorola. Oh, the irony!
It’s hard to imagine that they tried to ban radio scanners😂.
Maybe being American is why that sounds like severe govt overreach to me….
Some states will not allow them in vehicles. At home you are free to listen as you please as long as you do not reveal privy bits to the public or use the information for illegal dealings.
@ interesting
It wasn't entirely negative, to put it mildly. The more troubling aspect was the growing familiarity with the same cars and individuals reappearing at various significant jobs/calls, particularly during the night. In the past, the UK radio system could be easily accessed using an ordinary home radio, provided it had a wide enough bandwidth tuner. This meant that seemingly anyone could listen in without needing specialised equipment.
However, over time, this casual accessibility transitioned into something more nefarious. Picture this: at around 2 a.m., you find yourself stopping a vehicle that raises immediate suspicions. Inside, there are four occupants, all of whom seem overly attentive and anxious, and the boot is crammed full of gear meant for a break-in. As you approach the car, you can’t help but notice that the scanner is tuned to the local police station's frequency.
These individuals are not merely reckless; they are highly aware of the police patterns. They understand that during the night shift, especially in the early hours, a significant number of officers from the evening shift will be closing their shifts, resulting in a skeleton crew patrolling the town, city, or sector. Recognizing this vulnerability, they sometimes call 999 to report a fictitious, large-scale incident elsewhere, knowing full well that this tactic would draw the available police units to that specific area. This diversion provides them with a window of opportunity, allowing them to operate with a sense of security, fully aware that it could take up to 10 minutes-or even longer-for police to respond to a silent alarm at the premises they are targeting for burglary.
In the UK, there's a strict legal framework surrounding the use of radio equipment. To operate certain types of radio equipment, one must possess a valid license. Unauthorised listening to emergency service communications is a criminal offence. Therefore, if you discover a scanner hidden in a car during a stop, it typically serves as a strong indicator that the occupants are engaged in illicit activities and are likely up to no good.
Tried? It's been illegal to listen to police communications for nearly 20 years. And for good reason.
@@Shoomer1988yeah, listening to Satan is bad for your soul.
MP's "we need to access every persons every communication to fight fake terrorism."
Also MP's - "not OUR communications and we want a Stasi like police so their comms are also secret."
The problem with pretty much all early encryption systems is that they involved some sort of inversion and/or frequency translation. When that’s fed through a radio with limited audio bandwidth, what would normally be rolling off at 300Hz and 3KHz then translates to a hole in the audio pass band. With MASC, that hole keeps moving around, which sounds odd. Add to that, many UK police systems were quasi sync with with the bandwidth limited even further to aid equalisation it sounds even worse.
Several of the photos of aerial arrays on the top of cars aren’t for radio communication, they’re “Tracker” aerials fitted at the expense of “Tracker” to home-in on stolen vehicles
Loads of hours of listening to 452.425mhz nfm (Avon and Somerset constabulary)during the 90's. Brilliant! friday and weekend entertainment, way better than Eastenders anyway 😂
@SamFinch-bn8kr One of those 452.xxxx MHz Quantars from The Met is in operation to this day in San Francisco as one of our network's main ham repeaters (though IIRC it's on its 3rd power supply...)
watching paint dry is way better than watching eastenders
Every now and then, you would hear one of your friends/associates pop up on the scanner for petty stuff. So it was my duty to ring my friends (on my Nokia 5110) and give them a heads up lol. We were only young teens at the time and withen a few years we grew out of them shenanigans 😄
The good old days and you had the delay set to hear the reply .Also cordless phones baby monitors picking up the neighbours talking about each other i knew everything that was happening in my area .
I do remember in the 90s, but a judge ruled. It wasn’t illegal to own all listen to the police, but it was illegal to act on information received or using them with intent to commit crimes
The law was changed after this this was a loophole in the law that her lawyer found while defending someone who was being prosecuted for it The law was then strengthened
West Yoekshire, especially Leeds, MASC was installed on all units. I was lucky as i was one of the few civilians not working for the police to be allocated a radio and callsign.
Remember not long ago seeing an officer switch from his radio to cell phone during a situation in progress. Not certian what was up, but figure it was of priority to not be disclosed over the airwaves..about three squad cars involved.
Here in my corner of the US it's about half and half now between cellphones and P25.
@RT-qd8yl Same. I was a volunteer firefighter for many years, and I used to see it all the time during normal police work. It's simple and effective in keeping sensitive information off the airwaves.
Man when I was a kid I knew of a group of dudes that were trying to plan a hiest. And part of there plan was taking out the police radio towers. And then multiple people were gonna hit jewelery stores and banks. We have wild imaginations when ur a kid lol
The ham radio operators need to point out that they are often the people detecting criminal broadcasts and they should approach it as a civil defense force
LOL !
Most amateur equipment could be extended on TX / RX. I did this to a Kenwood TH42e in 1994. It was a handy radio to have, Kenwood dual band were also good.
I judge a police force's credibility based upon their behavior in issues like this. If the dispatch channel is open, they get high marks for transparency. If they encrypt everything, and do not present audio on delay, I get very suspicious of anything they do. Ultimately the police are public servants and we deserve to know how our taxes are being used. No, I'm not going to take their word for it. Banning scanners is a very sick sign. I wonder what they'll do if the public figures out how to decrypt these radios with SDR software. Good luck banning SDRs...
The police are crown servants. Just because they're paid for by taxes doesn't mean those paying taxes should be privy to all the inner workings.
From 2004 it was no longer possible in the Netherlands to listen to the Police and other emergency services via the scanner, With the arrival of C2000.
Now that the line between 'criminal audience' and 'criminal actors' is so grey perhaps a bit of surveillance is not only warranted but essential. Who watches the watchers?
All the encryptions have been broken and will continue.😊
I visited the Maine State Police a while back was shown the comms centre, given a list of their troop area, frequency lists and 10 codes. Here In Blighty I was busted for having a converted Burndept the one with the yellow button on top.
Really, I used to buy surplus ones from police to put on 70cm! The burndept still has the Home Office 9v batteries. They had 3 terminals do they could never be installed the wrong way!
We used to listen to Lothian and Borders Police in the 70’s it was 102-103 FM
at the same period I printed (RTTY hacked Teletype 50 bits/s !) messages from the District Bureau (Prefecture) which were sent in clear on +/- 86Mhz, received on regular FM receiver (WFM) at the low limit of the commercial band. They conveyed sensible informations on recruiting employes (CV) and even more, movements of trucks transporting radioactive dumps (!) giving complete itinerary and the place where the trucks stayed during the WE (!). My neighbours complained of the continuous noise of the Teletype!. Happy days...
I remember doing the same in Stoke.
Did they play the top 40 chart, or was it more like a University station?
@Dwigt_Rortugal it was Sting and his chums 24hrs a day.
Back when I was a kid (70's), you could pick the police radio on a bog standard VHF/FM radio in the 100+ range.
Great overview of the history toward total conversion to digital radio encryption in the UK, thank you!
In NZ the Nz Police AOS (Armed Offenders Squad) went early digital, of sorts, here in about 1995 after the media were listening to them and their operations and were turning up filming the unfolding drama. They thought they'd put a stop to cameras turning up so they introduced a "scrambler" on their simplex AOS frequency which was an audio scrambler. However it still produced a carrier so DF loops were used to find the strong signal and media still turned up ! What they also did not realize was that when they went to cellphones to talk about something sensitive, back then, cellphones were analogue so it was really easy to listen in to their conversation. So cameras still turned up ! Nowdays P25 and digitial mobile phones have put a complete stop to eavesdropping but social media sites are now used to see whats happening around the place sometimes thats very hit or miss. Once upon a time I was a news camera person. New Zealand has only encrypted the three main cities so far mainly because of the cost and the remoteness of upgrading rural sites.Analogue radio sites use a lot less power thatn a digital site.
Greetings from NZ
Why were they so intent on not having cameras there? Something to hide?
@@RT-qd8yl They just considered cameras not important. The use of the word obstruction and arrest was threatened frequently if we did not go away or stop filming when they demanded. The old "filming in a public place" argument alweays came up.
This. So many people on here seem convinced that encrypting comms immediately equals corruption. There are plenty of good reasons to encrypt, and keeping people from interfering with an active scene is one of them. The idea that an entire police force is corrupt, while possible, seems less likely than a group of corrupt officers within a department. Therefore, broadcasting corrupt activity to an entire department over encrypted comms seems dangerous and impractical if you're engaged in corruption. If you're being corrupt, wouldn't it make more sense to keep the corrupt communication limited to the smallest possible number of people possible by using mobile phones? I don't buy this notion that encrypting radio traffic makes corruption more likely.
@@Dwigt_Rortugal More lazy, or abusing power. Open comms allow civilian / community oversight committees to know when they are underreporting stuff, or similar.
Thanks RM***
The pettiness of unionised staff never ceased to amaze me, one tri-service comms centre for Airwave I heard about had to be built with three entrances so that the police, fire and ambulance staff could have their 'own' entrance into the centre.
The problem with airwave was that streaming data, like pictures or videos, was impossible even with the new teds2 upgrade. That's why you pretty much see officers carrying mobile phones as well. Tetra or airwave, as it is known in the UK, was relatively secure until the encryption was indeed broken. I am amazed that it is taking so long for its replacement. But to be honest, what do I know. I wish everyone a merry Christmas and a happy New Year...
Algorithm recommended me this vid, very cool, very informative, I've always wondered how the UK handled police scanners as I'm not old enough to remember the 90s all that well 😂
In the 70's an FM radio could pick up police transmissions! An ordinary radio!!!!
Love these!! Thank you
In North America, law enforcement uses the propriatory Tim Horton radio system called "Deployment of Operational Networks for Urgent Transmissions" or "DONUT"
The Tim Hortons protocols are only used in Canada, eh. Here in the States, troopers are linked to the Digital Uniform Notoriety and Knowldge Network, or DUNKN.
In Northern Maine, they tried the DONUT protocol, but no matter how hard they tried to get it right, it just wasn't the same as north of the border. Unrelated, I saw a Tim Hortons in Bangkok, of all places. We laughed, as there were two motorcycle cops stopped there.
This reminds me of something I heard around 1995:
Police responding to an alarm sounding at a business.
They couldn't see any signs of forced entry, but there was a door with a combination lock, so they radio the control room, and are told the combination.
They enter and check things out and find nothing suspicious, so they lock up and leave.
Later that night, the place was burgled - entry via that same door - using the correct combination ! :D
In the US where many consider monitoring the police a form of transparency a proposal has been made whereby police transmissions are encrypted but a delayed version is broadcast unencrypted. I'm not really sure that makes sense though because if they wanted something hidden there would no doubt be a "malfunction" in the retransmission.
The 4 aerials shown at 07:15 are actually Tracker signal direction finders pick up the pings from activated tracker units and give a rough location of the stolen car.
MASC and Cougar was in use by various forces
Racal cougar used a "fill gun" to install the encrytion into each set
What comes to mind is a room somewhere in Langley Virginia, with numerous individuals, and a plethora of equipment designed to hack such encrypted systems.
Have you seriously ever considered biding all your radio history kmowledge and content into a well structured documentary? I find this content so interesting. Most times I just listen to it and enjoy the stories and radio stuff in them. Cheers from Panama. Happy holidays.
Maybe one day! Thanks!
@@RingwayManchester happy to help with the effort if you do decide to pursuit it. Your channel has the unique value of adding history and context to radio, and not just tech stuff.
FYI its pronounced Lemster
Lolol here in South Australia we moved to a full stand alone digital system in the 1990's
About time, and badly needed
Merry Christmas Lewis. 🙂
Same to you!
I used to listen to Northumbria Police back in the 90's and I can confirm a lot of the traffic wasn't encrypted unless an operation was ongoing.
Here most of responders are using TETRA (except some of volunteer fire brigades). You can still listen to railway communication (and if you are malicious you can even stop all the trains around, but they better never find you). This vulnerability is slowly comint to an end, so only disaster response will use analog communication, especially because HAM operators are encouraged by law to help in such cases (of course if their equipment is functional)
Now some criminals groom 15,16,17yo teenagers to join the police force.
There was a period ( early 90's) where encrypted radios were only issued to specialist groups while response officers radios were still unencrypted, I can remember being involved supporting an operation by such a unit and we used Cougar encrypted radios but they were just back to back in operation, no assistance from any repeaters so range was very limited.
Rumour has it that the Phillips pox radios didn’t use encryption. They were so bad, no one could understand what was being said anyway 😂
I always found masc to be rubbish Pete. Those Motorolas I showed in the video weren’t the clearest
We used to do it as kids back in the 70s. In those days, I think you got the Police on VHF. I found it boring, but I think a lot of kids thought it was edgy and daring.
My uncle loved doing this in the late 80's and into the 90's. He stopped when mobile phones became commonplace.
Exelente todos tus videos!!!
Muy felices fiestas para vos y los tuyos!!!
Desde Argentina un abrazo grande LU7EUG.
Villains lol, great vid Lewis.
Police Coms in Australia have been encrypted for a decade at least. You can still listen to Fire, Ambulance and State Emergency Services, they use trunked systems, but they are not encrypted.
All those services are in one big bundle here so it appears that if they all use the same radios, the same conditions apply.
@@TomSherwood-z5l They were here too. The original GRN (Govt Radio Network Trunked system) included all emergency services, but Police went to an encrypted version.
MASC, what fun to use...some slight added benefits in that it also gave the radio ID so you knew who was calling, the emergency button and the remote stun ability that we didn't have before. Had a great ICCS DS1000 system made that was one of the few systems that was ahead of its time.
I’ve got two pristine ht600e masc radios from a police HQ that’s never seen a patrol only used at HQ not a scratch on them
My Mum used to go to bed with a really rudimentary airband radio and "listen to the police messages". Like another commenter above said it was a city wide hobby in Bristol in the 90s as they dealt with nightly joy riders- which in my parents' case ended up one night with my mum listening to a chase which ended up with a stolen car crashing into our front garden! Ps I have very little interest in radio as a hobby but also watch your content religiously and have done for years!
The British Batman is gonna be screwed then lol.
The police in my area only switched to MASC when they needed to pass sensitive info. This was commanded by the control operators, to switch every user on the channel into MASC. But if not every radio received the command, they had a split network where some users were locked out. If the operators failed to get everyone into MASC mode after a couple of attempts, they would give up and just pass the traffic in the clear.
Over a period of time the operators lost confidence in the system and just stopped using it.
When mobile phones got cheaper and started to be issues to police, they would just ask them to ring in to pass the sensitive info.
I recently heard of some people who used to monitor the police using PMR radios, who also had the output freqs programmed in for transmit. And they would transmit over the channel when they heard the data bursts used to command MASC, so jamming the channel locally to them. Stopping some users radios from going onto MASC mode, allowing them to continue to eavesdrop.
The TETRA system was commissioned using drive testing by ROSCOM of Derby and I worked on the project for 2 years, effectively a 2y driving holiday with 2 x TETRA sets in the car automatically communicating with an identical pair of sets, all equipped with automatic call generators and recording kit.
Police in my city used Motorola Sabers equipped with DVP (Digital Voice Protection) which were in use by certain squads.
Certain channels were DVP only through repeaters to maintain decent range across most of the city.
General duties were in the clear on analogue conventional UHF until 2006 when they switched on the P25 trunked network and encrypted ALL Police talkgroups (AES256).
With some of the nasty people around these days, I am glad that the radio network is secure.
You are very well equipped with that Rohde & Schwarz receiver 😮
I'm pretty sure that when I was a small child, I use to listen to the local police on 100mhz on my portable cassette radio.
Stumble across what the police are doing…..what F’all?
Muggleton Road, Amesbury, Wiltshire. Police "TETRA Radio" removed from Flat within Evidence Bag, 2018. No explanation via Authorities. Images available on line.
The system is open to those who know!, yes it's not easy but it's there if you know what your doing!.
Yes, a call from an officer to warn people paying them...
When I was a kid in the 1960s you could just tune an ordinary domestic FM (VHF) radio to the upper end of the band and listen in to the police. Earlier radios had only gone up to around 100 MHz, but later ones went up to around 108 MHz, and that included some of the police frequencies. I think the official line was you were not supposed to tune in, but many people had radios that could pick up those frequencies!
I have a hunch that Cobra bought out Whistler. Their already selling re-labeled radar detectors. The Cobra 700i for example. I think Whistler should have stuck with the radar detector, laser jammer markets. They bought out GRE Com. for the police scanner line. Uniden sells pre programmed digital scanners. With the option to purchase encryption keys separately or as a group. They also sell updated preloaded sim cards for their scanners.
I think things will stay the same, listen as much as you want, but don't allow any USE of anything you hear. That includes admitting you heard anything.
thanks really enjoyed the video
as I live in Texas, radio service for law enforcement and public safety use digital radios
Got to say, I was being watched in about 1992, the scanner told me. "Mike 1 to Foxtrot, he's left the premises, going the usual route" well, there you go. Worth the £350 or whatever it was.
What are the police trying to hide is the more important question.
When they come knocking at your door?
@@Roads_of_Europe
That's what you get for having opinions on the internet, criminal scum. I just reported you for hate incidents
Exactly! Why would you not be proud of your law officers and their service? Are there really that many criminals listening in? They make it sound like half the country are convicts!
If a bank job crew has access to police communications, then it's not hard to use that information to help evade and escape after the job.
cor up tion
GMP definitely used the Philips PFX during the mid 90s.
I remember listening to the Police searching for the Yorkshire Ripper, using nothing more fancy than a domestic Radio....
My Parents had a second hand stereo and it was possible to listen to several emergency wave lengths including the police you could only hear one side but it was boating and we never bothered to listen.
Funny how the pigs can do all that but cant stop burglary's, or other serious crimes
Those crimes happen against people the state views somewhere between "useful as a piggy bank" and an enemy.
We all have seen how they've shifted from policing crimes to policing protest.
I remember back in the 80s i had a scanner mostly for fire department activities. I was surprised back then the police were unencrypted.
Back in the 60s you didn't even need a scanner, you could pick up police comms on an ordinary commercial VHF radio.
Comment: the PFX MASC had an extended front, because there was no room in the radio for the crypto module..The software based MASC PRP radios were used in ireland, never saw one in the UK.
you show cars equiped with the four VHF quarter wave antennas that were for tracking the old expensive TRACKER anti theft system in cars. (LO-JACK in the USA.)
True story…….I got caught in about 1993 with a handheld radio scanner in the car. We got pulled over for a stop check and my mate in the passenger seat was too slow hiding it under the seat……..got a court summons, ended up with a conditional discharge and scanner confiscated.
We wasn’t even doing anything wrong with it, just nosey to see what was going on 😂
In the 1970s you knew you had found the police band in my home in Coventry. You knew you had hit it because of the Beep, Beep, Beep, then an operator talking. Later in the early 90’s when I joined the police, I was surprised by how unbothered the senior officers were by the fact people were listening. In the nick where I was based, the local criminals would know how many cars were back in on refs during the night shift based on the times they heard us asking for the main automatic gates into the rear of the station to be opened when coming back to the station. After that, each shift would be creative in using all sorts of codewords back to the controller in the station such as “Betsy, heavens or doom”. It was only after you caught one or two of the burglars who were breaking into the local Woolworths, Shoe shops or other shops because they'd sit in the back of the car laughing at us telling us they had worked out the codewords we were using to open the station carpark gates.
When the first Airwaves units were introduced, it was a big seachange. Before the local control in your station was able to send out one message if an urgent job came in. We all struggled with the silence at first until the first changes were made allowing you to hear what was going on in the town by the broadcast feature. Sadly, all the local control rooms were closed in favour of everything coming from HQ, losing the local knowledge as the operators became civvies permanently based in the South of the county.
The other issue we had was the old Motorola HT’s (2:37) were nice and heavy and if in your hand you could clonk someone scrapping with you with it. The Airwaves were only as heavy as a mobile phone. They were not as robust as the Motorola and if you ended up in a scrap on the ground in the town centre on a Saturday night, they broke. This resulted in a mountain of paperwork and bollocking by the duty Inspector.
People should be allowed to listen to the police chatter, especially when the police are so politicized and anti-native.
In the USA, I can listen to police/fire/ambulance on "Broadcastify" if someone is feeding the scanner take to the webpage.
Not all states are completely open though. NY City for instance is limited to FS and the odd smaller division.
When they were on 100FM I used to listen in occasionally. It was really quite boring. That was 40+ years ago.
I'd love a scanner again, so entertaining
I miss the 90s me and my pals in my shed listening to Helter skelter and dreamscape tapes or getting out the scanner had some not so legal fun with those
The government going full fascist
When it comes to comms there will be different levels of security due to cost and complexity and preventing serious organised crime is a higher priority than securing against threats from state level actors except for the Security Services.
In the USA the police operated on 1750khz AM just outside the MW band
Burglars don't need the radios as the Police will not be turning up. I believe it is the Auditors that the Police are scared of, it is those dreaded cameras. They film you but do not like being filmed back.
Ultimately the police want be able to arrest people who think about committing crimes. 🤔
Let that thought sink in, but not for too long, it could be an arrestable offence soon! 😉
The UK. A police state in the making.
You could do a whole lot worse. A whole lot worse. Most of us have no idea what it's like to live in a true police state and we take for granted what we have. Yes, hold the police accountable and enforce anti-corruption with truly proportionate punishment for corruption. Wherever there are humans with authority or power, we're pretty much guaranteed to have corruption unless there are robust measures to deal with and deter it.
Hey Ringway, do a video on Racal Cougar 😗
I was just thinking that. He should do one on Cougar radio
Ok!
@@RingwayManchesteri worked on the Cougar VHF radio in the mid80s. 16kbit/s CVSD voice coding was much easier to encrypt than the earlier analog systems
Big Brother. Unaccountable. Police now need their encryption fix.
How you descramble the voice 😊 we have P25 been trying to decode it with an analogue radio
Started off as dolphin radios as i was using 1 in 2000 when i was driving taxis could clear anywhere in the uk np and drive back to base still talking to the boss.
Heard my mate being chased in a Rover 3500 in the 90s. It was his scanner, he'd gone up the shop for beer and left it at mine. Literally 10 minutes later Surrey police are giving a running comentary 😂
great friends you keep. Spent much time at Her Majesty's Pleasure?
@occamraiser It was HIS car and it was the 90s. No I haven't, but you seem to have all the knowledge of that. Have you? Dypshyte!
Then again, I doubt you've spent much time away from mummies spare room PC watching pawn (intentional) while we have fun. Picking your nose and whatever else!!
@@occamraiserwho cares