Hearing Telephone Conversations
 

About 10 years ago now, one sunday morning, I was tuning around the SW
Bands.
(On a very common Panasonic Radio that had the basic SW frequencies. 6,000 -
19,000 approx.)

It was one of my first forrays into SWL (and one which kept me hooked.) and
after a while of tuning around
I stumbled across what seemed to be a conversation with two people, in
particular two elderly women.

At first I thought it was a radio soap/drama as the conversation was full of
gossip. (In fact one of the elderly women reported the death of a close
friend, to which the other replied with arresting apathy.)

About 5 minutes of this insued..

Then both parties said goodbye to each other and hung up, with a small beep
to signal the end of the call. I waited for about ten seconds and I heard
the ringing tone again (beep, beep..... beep,beep in case you didn't know.)

The same voice was heard (she must have picked up the phone and dialled
someone else.) And the conversation continued. (With the previous caller
being gossiped about this time,)



I know it is possible to listen into telecommunications, and they have
designated frequencies, but I was surprised to hear that kind of thing at
all so easily. I don't condone listening to private conversations, but this
was a one off, which I was surprised by.

Is this a common occurance? Has anybody else got any good stories of hearing
this kind of stuff?

Jason,I DO condone (in fact,I have a few "gadgets" here,they are legal)
listening to private conversations.You probally had your radio tuned to
somewhere around the AM 800 band and you was picking up some regular
telephone conversations on that band.Fairly common,it used to be.But
what with the advent of digital spred spectum modern day telephones and
cell phones (mobile phones) it is getting rare to pick up such
conversations on radio.
cuhulin

Listening in on private telephone conversations is where you get the
best juicey dirt.I love it! I can tell y'all stories!
cuhulin

"Jason" wrote in message
...


Is this a common occurance?

Yeah, alot of the older cordless phones would put spurious emissions into
the SW bands. The ones from the late 70s or early 80s used frequencies just
above 1600 kHz for one channel.

I think the later UHF type cordless phones are SW quiet.



Has anybody else got any good stories of hearing
this kind of stuff?



Mostly it's just so much interference. But I did overhear some mope lie to
his wife and sweet talk his girlfriend. That's as good as it ever got, and
that was amusing for only a few minutes. Domestic phone just can't compete
with domestic SW as entertainment.

Frank Dresser

If I recall correct from flipping through the Radio Shack catalog at the
age of 8 or so, to look at all the stuff I *couldn't* have, cordless phones
used to be around 27 mhz, and also some were 49 mhz. Same went for Radio-
Shack RC cars. The "better" models ran at 49 mhz.

Conan Ford wrote in
3.159:

If I recall correct from flipping through the Radio Shack catalog at
the age of 8 or so, to look at all the stuff I *couldn't* have,
cordless phones used to be around 27 mhz, and also some were 49 mhz.
Same went for Radio- Shack RC cars. The "better" models ran at 49
mhz.



Follow-up, a little history he
http://www.affordablephones.net/HistoryCordless.htm

It was probably an image of a 27 mhz phone.

Yes, older cordless phones, maybe the first generation oof them,
operated around 1800 kHz, just above the MW band. The base (wall) unit
transmitted both sides of the conversation at a stronger level than the
handset, often for a couple miles or more. These phones are probably
almost all replaced by now wth the later 49 Mhz, and then the 902 Mhz
types. If there is not a lot of traffic on the 49 mHz frequency, they
can also be heard for somewhat lesser distances, but most of the 900+
Mhz phones use encryption schemes and are not listenable.

On Sun, 24 Apr 2005 14:11:31 -0400, (RM MS) wrote:

Yes, older cordless phones, maybe the first generation oof them,
operated around 1800 kHz, just above the MW band. The base (wall) unit
transmitted both sides of the conversation at a stronger level than the
handset, often for a couple miles or more. These phones are probably
almost all replaced by now wth the later 49 Mhz, and then the 902 Mhz
types. If there is not a lot of traffic on the 49 mHz frequency, they
can also be heard for somewhat lesser distances, but most of the 900+
Mhz phones use encryption schemes and are not listenable.

Dream on. Those boogers are a constant source of entertainment.
Unless it's called ''digital'' they aren't encryted.

In article 9,
Conan Ford wrote:
If I recall correct from flipping through the Radio Shack catalog at the
age of 8 or so, to look at all the stuff I *couldn't* have, cordless phones
used to be around 27 mhz, and also some were 49 mhz. Same went for Radio-
Shack RC cars. The "better" models ran at 49 mhz.

Back in the '70s and early '80s, cordless phones used, as I remember,
5 channels around 1600-1750 kHz for the base station, and 49 MHz for
the handset. Both FM, but you could receive them fairly well on an
AM receiver. Later they switched to 46 and 49 MHz.

I heard one neighbor, in the 3.5 MHz ham band, complaining that her
phone wasn't working well. It turned out to have a stronger
signal on the second harmonic than on the fundamental.

Some of them of them used frequency inversion scrambling which I found
out was completely useless as, even though it was an FM transmission,
it could be heard perfectly well on an SSB receiver. (Or at least on
my R-1000 which can run SSB with the 12 kHz wide filter).

Now they run on 915 MHz, 2.4 and 5.? GHz. Good riddance.

I also remember reading that some "smart" phones put out a spurious
AM signal on their microprocessor's crystal clock frequency. Pre-bugged
phones.

Mark Zenier Washington State resident

You may have heard "ship to shore".