Radio Scanners can you get 087-086 phone calls

paulthelegend

I remember back in the day being able to get 088 phone calls and it was some craic, but then when they went down i gave up on it... who cares about taxi places or gaurds talking useless info ...

So now its been a fair few years, have they made any advances with scanners so you can connect them to your pc and get encrypted phone calls or even text messages?

If its seriously illegal then just answer yes or no im just curious

pontovic

you could but it would be some seriously expensive equipment i would imagine like the stuff that the cops would use. might be difficult to get your hands on....

whiskeyman

maybe if you work for the CIA or GCHQ....
pulled the below from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone

Using a Radio scanner dating to before 1994 or a modified radio scanner dating to 1996 or 1997, one can typically listen to calls made on old analog cell phones as easy as one can listen to an FM radio. However, newer cell phones use transcievers in the gigahertz range, well above most older scanners. In addition, many (most) cell phones on the market today are backed by many digital type encryption systems.

Sparky

yup digital encryption is what will be stopping you and good, id rather not like to think that some joe soap can randomly listen to my calls.
bar someone in o2.

entropi

Aye, in the old days u COULD listen to 088 calls if u were a nosey little sh*t, 086 and 087 were digital signals unlike 088 and other frequencies like Garda and Taxi services which were analog and CB radio.

And as mentioned, you would usually need to work for a government agency like CIA or MI5 or the Garda Surveillance team here to tune into digital / satellite bands.

petes

Its a bit mad in my office here. Our internal paging system picks up people driving by on their mobile phones at times. As its slow moving traffic outside hear a couple of sentences. Mad. Wonder if they stopped...

Sparky

my cousin had a scanner and we were down in leitrim one time and turned it on and heard someone having a conversation about a sheep stuck in the ditch, the woman who i assume was on the landline would be hard to hear, but you could hear her never theless

it was great craic, and some times with the 088 you could get crossed lines, got that one time in the car when we passed someone we could hear there conversation for a bit.

and a bit to landlines, one time our connection box on the pole was leaking so when you picked up the reciever you could hear like a 12way conversation, me and my dad had a laugh, he pretended to ring me and be a guard reporting an incident, all the other callers went quiet and when the conversation ended between us they had a chat about it.

Irishstabber

When I pick up my landline phone from time to time I can hear a faint conversation in the background. This great fun.

irishgeo

i to get crossed lines on my 087 phone sometimes. i go to make a call and i heard was two fellas having a conversation. It was near the end of it. I also used to get a strange noise like a train makes when moving when making calls on my house phone. Its seems to have stopped now.