Comments by "Bond25" (@Bond2025) on "Ringway Manchester" channel.

  1. One thing that was popular int eh 1980s was "PIRATE TV". I bought a TV transmitter known as a "Video Sender" in the late 80s to transmit the output from a VCR around the house to TVs. I still have it to this day in a box and it still works! People would use them and then leave them on broadcasting films. You had to know about them or find them by chance when tuning around. There was someone local to me that did this at weekends and must have been using a computer generated test card. It was one film after another, no contact details. The output was only around 10-20mW on mine, so I suspect people were using amateur equipment for a bit of fun to amplify them. I never used mine this way as connecting it to a TV aerial wouldn't have got far, only at the back of all the other TV aerials ! In those days I knew nothing about RF, so nothing about UHF aerial designs and the Internet wasn't a thing then. It still does CH21-68 analogue with a video in and audio in plug. If I could have turned the aerial around to face everyone elses I might have tried it out. It was definitely possible to interfere with TV for a few houses nearby using the small telescopic aerial.
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  2. I don't use DABradio as the quality of the audio, even in the car, is rubbish. It is like listening to AM mono radio compared to FM stereo. When i first heard tests on DAB in the 2000s the audio was over 200Kbps, now its mono at as low as 32Kbps.
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  3. In 1994 there was an attack on a radio communications tower in Delamere Forest in error. The tap was known about, but not exactly where it was located, someone tried to knock the tower down! I only know because of a building survey as an emergency to make sure cracks and damage would not cause too much of a problem. The area had a no-fly zone which was handy. As for vans and other vehicles used by intelligence services, they have a whole fleet of vans and uniforms from every company going. Facilities Management companies are a favourite as people get in to sites and are often left alone to do their "work". There is a training site in Ellesmere Port on the industrial estate if any of the auditor people want to go along! See how long you last. Residents were not told to keep quiet and never provided with double glazing or anything else, that is rubbish. A lot of the computer equipment and people operating it was in the houses in the road next to it, not the bungalows.
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  4. I got told my amateur radio aerials were causing my old neighbours to be really ill. There was nothing on the other end of the coax as I had been decorating for months.
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  5. All of them are without warrant, how do you think GCHQ and NSA operate. All your internet traffic goes through them for processing. That includes what you THINK is secure. They run multiple sites and operate VPN companies too.
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  6. At 9:15 my samsung phone woke up with the Gemini AI thing i don't even use and started asking how it could help me...
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  7. The Lindenblad type aerial, awful things in my opinion. 4 dipoles in parallel at 45degrees means a huge MINUS dB figure and having to use fairly big power amps to overcome the loss and achieve a reasonable ERP. I really wouldn't waste my time with one as coverage is nowhere near as good as a stacked dipole arrangement or stacked circular polarised aerials. Why put 600Watts in, waste all that electric with much bigger power amps, splitters and coax and have less coverage than using 4 times less to get the same coverage for stacked circular polarisation aerials OR 6 to 8 times less through a single dipole! I've never understood why people want circular polarisation now anyway, vertical is how most people have aerials. Even horizontal has died out.
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  8. The neighbouring houses were full of computer equipment and people processing it. I drove up there a few times for work purposes and was always watched!!!
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  9. Quite a few aerials up there, well worth a look.
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  10. I was working in a BT exchange in the middle of Chester and each time I walked past one rack I could smell burning. I got one of the engineers and he had a sniff around and come back a few minutes later with a board to replace the burnt out one with. He looked at it and laughed saying, "that's half of Chester that's been unable to make any calls". This was the time when more and more computers were being installed and you needed huge rooms with aircon plants in them. That's all changed since and most of the old equipment replaced. I can't even remember the road, but it is off a main road right in the middle of Chester, a fairly big building.
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  11. Do you know about mics they install on certain buildings to detect and record things like gunshots and to triangulate them! This was tried in the 80s and then about 10 years ago. London started it off. The Special Constable network is widely used as people are from various jobs and backgrounds and can get info the police need warrants or production orders for and need a genuine reason to access - mostly without any trace or suspicion. examples are info from BT systems, NHS systems, banks, credit reference agencies, DVLA etc - depending on where different Special Constables work - don't say it doesn't go on! They also have access to buildings to install equipment that wouldn't usually be allowed, so quite a resource to have.
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  12. A real shame as most DABradio station audio quality is worse than AM, and a lot is in mono anyway.
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  13. Quality of DABradio is pathetic in the UK and it is mostly MONO. On one car I have the DABradio aerial is built in to the back window. Unfortunately the rear car camera and wiring used to generate quite a bit of "noise" and de-sensitise the radio on DAB, so I had to get a different camera that linked the rear to the front camera using mini coax. This happens a lot and people often wonder why DABradio and their normal radio starts acting odd. It might not be anything to do with this in your case. It means my aerial is effectively horizontal, so reception is limited compared to if it had been vertical. Poor design on the car manufacturers part. A lot of broadcast stations are mixed polarisation, but I always think that is a waste of time, money and power when most people use vertical polarisation at home.
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  14. Well, there is a reason "AM" is used on aircraft frequencies and why it was used extensively by police radios fitted to cars, fire engine radios, also a lot of PMR from the 1970s and 1980s... Now it is just aircraft using it. In the late 80s I used to have a Uniden 2830 in my car and used that on USB mobile with friends on CB frequencies! AM was far better than FM when driving around. It just seemed to be clearer and louder.
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  15. The disused 68-88MHz would have been ideal for DAB and the coverage is really good on those frequencies. It works a lot better than 200MHz! I am not sure why they went for near 175MHz to 225MHz, I used a PMR service called Dolphin TETRA in Band 3 in the 1990s. Coverage was OK, but it was single digital channels in use on a shared repeater system from Winter Hill. No one wants DABradio now because of low audio quality, low bitrates and mono, all the stations playing the same music in a different order with continual adverts and silly announcements... People prefer to use their phone and stream audio as it is more convenient and sounds a lot better.
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  16. Also known for Solicitor Robert Broudie, the brother of lightning seeds singer Ian Broudie, jumping off the roof in 2007 around 11am one morning. He left £5Million in his Will, with £3Million of it to charities, including those for people with mental health conditions.
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  17. Another fact about microwaves, hope it isn't classified, is that they were used to entice the enemy closer in order to attack them. Planes would pick up the signal and think there was something there... Door safety switches were messed with so the microwave would be left running with the door off and pointing in to the sky so it looked like a RADAR installation.
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  18. WOW, lots of services used 88-108MHz as commercial radio never went past about 98MHz. British Gas used 106.2MHz AM. Fire Service used just below 88MHz, also AM.
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  19. It was a great hobby in the 80s and 90s, now all people hear is aircraft, marine, amateur and PMR. There is nothing else and they all get boring. Don't waste your time and money. Mobile phones killed off PMR companies in 1994, shared repeater use vanished. Low cost radios for shop security are mostly digital now. Why would you want to hear aircraft or marine! Everything else of interest is digital and encrypted so you will never hear it.
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  20. That wouldn't have taken much power. If you think about a room of people shouting to each other, if you have someone next to you, you will hear them louder than others further away. That's how transmitters work. 50KW 10 miles away can easily be blocked by 10 Watts for a mile radius from the transmitter. It doesn't mean he had more power, it's just that he was closer.
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  21.  @TheSpotify95  I used to listen to KISS on DABradio in the car, it was brilliant at 192Kbps. Then it dropped to 160Kbps, then 128, then 112, then 80 until it sounded absolutely rubbish. That happened to a lot of DABradio stations. It turned in to a massive public con. We were promised high quality clear sounding audio with no interference. remember all the misleading adverts that had to be changed. People happily went from FM Stereo to DABmono/low bitrate/no dynamic range audio. Local radio become nothing more than the same music collections in similar orders with different adverts played over them, some announcements thrown in and a bit of talking and news. I don't listen to much radio now. In the 80s and 90s, Pirate Stations took off as they give people what they wanted. Everyone in the North West should remember the stations Radio Merseywaves, Storeton Community Radio, North Coast Radio, Radio Julie, Lazer UK and many others. Many broadcast for years on MW and VHF with good coverage.
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  22. It is quite interesting to experiment with things like this. I have stopped in Wales and loaded up a wire fence through an impedance matcher on HF. On 160M and 80M I was getting loads of contacts. That was on 5 Watts. The fence must have been a mile long on a hill. I am very much in to "stealth antennas" and have a full set up for HF to UHF, no one spots them unless they really know what to look for. I've even used a wire clipped on the back of a gutter around as house as a loop antenna on HF. I also tuned up a length of 75ohm coax going up a wall to a pole and TV antenna on 10M. Aerials don't have to be high up for HF, you can run them 2ft off the ground and get great results.
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  23. I used to watch the helicopter downlink and the council CCTV cameras! No one knew at the time and companies mis-sold a lot of equipment.
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  24. I bought a Pro34 in Novemeber 1988 when they were introduced. £249.99 and it still works to this day, even after modifying to listen to POCSAG in the late 90s. Nothing on it now apart from marine, airband and the odd PMR. In the 80's and 90's it was quite interesting to listen on! Years later I used a Kenwood TH42E after extending the TX/RX to cover 400 to 470MHz... programmed mainly for my 70cm use, but one or two channels with split RX/TX were interesting! That Kenwood lasted about 6 years and broke, cheaply made junk. I got it through a company I was doing business with, Kenwood sold all the radios at 40% of retail to companies, so I got a real bargain. You get ripped off at amateur radio dealerships.
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  25. That's what I was thinking of, I called it an aircraft locator! I keep meaning to go and have a look at that when I am over there next.
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  26. No, use Drone Assist and it will show no-fly areas and the drone should not take off anyway to protect the user. I would be more worried about the RF knocking it out of the sky! I had to go to a number of radio sites in the 90s and one car I hated taking was a Land Rover. There was no way of getting up a steep hill and path without it, but when it was locked, it refused to unlock or start in some areas. It had to be unlocked with the key and pushed down the hill before it would come back to life. We did once try driving up a steep hill in Wales in an XR3i and got it completely stuck to half way up the wheels. Some transmitter sites are often remote or well hidden. One was by a Country Park at the top of Hope Mountain in Wales, but the aerial was disguised as an actual tree ! Amazing bit of design, it took me ages to find as I was looking for a mast.
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  27. It's to stop the locals breaking in and either pinching stuff or causing damage or worse to themselves. A few of the MW pirates probably thought about hooking up a TX to that tower. The Medium Wave and Short Wave pirate scene is still fairly big in the UK of you know when and where to listen. With bigger stations vanishing, it leaves the bands available.
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  28. He is probably referring to CAVE RESCUE RADIO systems. A little known fact is that only certain frequencies are any good for cave rescue! VLF too. They are often tested in old mines and caves for ground penetration. Idea for another video there!
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  29. So do I - around 100MHz AM. They also used 154MHz AM by me for many years.
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  30. What really annoys me is fancy mixed polarisation aerials - often set as a beam on a 45degree angle or 4 folded dipoles at 45degree angles on 4 poles or those X shaped ones with 8 or 12 elements. All of them are a total waste of power, stations are having to pump in 4 times the power to get any coverage because they are inefficient. I looked at the old JUICE FM TX in Liverpool a few years ago and they were using a compromised antenna with 100Watts and gain of -2.5dB, so were allowed to turn the RF up to around 140Watts to give 100W at the aerial to overcome feeder loss. It was a dipole that had each element bent out so it was part horizontal, then vertical. It only give a combined H/V radiation pattern with 50Watts in each plane in theory. They would have been better using two dipoles - or just using vertical polarisation. I am not even sure if it is still in the Cathedral. You can go on the roof for a tour of the cathedral in Liverpool most days and look at the transmitter room if you're lucky and all the aerials on the roof. There are PMR, police, mobile companies, coastguard, taxi service and radio stations.
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  31. It is a thick tar like substance that sticks to skin and clothing and is extremely difficult to get off. It puts people off climbing on or near it.
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  32. I remember Gordon! That's going back to the early 80s. He wasn't just in Manchester, he went all over the North West with Malcolm!
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  33. I've got a 20Watt amp that will work on 868MHz and live on a hill with views to Manchester and Wales and beyond, so it will be interesting to also run a preamp and see how many people i can contact. I will be using a home made Slim Jim type antenna to keep the radiation angle low. Many 1/4 and 5/8wave designs tend to fire upwards which is of no use for distance. They might have more gain, but less blanket coverage.
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  34. It's the aerial they allow to float on the surface of the water, it's extremely long and can't be detected.
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  35. In the mid 1980s, Radio Julie in Merseyside used a very clever solution. Andy the engineer used those Tandy mains intercoms to link the studio to the transmitter. Then he found that he could send audio down old Rediffusion cables between flats and this helped on one raid. The DTI man run in to the flat and followed the lead from the TX to a plate on the wall ! One of them even had a heart attack running up the stairs int he flats. Sadly, Andy is no longer with us. He would have approved of 10GHz links and what people got up to in later years like DIMENSION FM 92.2 in Telford. When they put their TX on The Wrekin TV mast and linked to the caravan studio in a barn, we could hear them clearly in the North West and often as far as Southport and Chester.
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  36. It is!
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  37.  @RingwayManchester  When you returned from the toilet, your table had gone! Most people went at night when it was dark, but it still give great views. You can go further along the Strand in to the hotel and sit right at the top of it.
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  38. There were two serving estates at the end of the M53, but I can't find the exact details. I think they were on the MB21 site. People were wondering why there were two TV aerials on a lamp post. One was a horizontal group C/D pointing at Winter Hill, and underneath was a vertical Group A pointing to two estates by J2/3 M53. This was analogue TV. Another filler repeater was by J1 M53 and outside a council tip on a lamp post, same arrangement, Group C/D horizontal towards Winter Hill and Group A vertical to local area or housing. The power output was only 1 or 2 Watts and 5 channels when in operation. Maybe anyone local can have a look or confirm this. The M53 J2/3 one was no longer required when the Storeton Transmitter (M53 J4/5) went on air. People could use that, including a lot of people in Liverpool who were line of sight and a mile or two away compared to Winter Hill. The only problem was they got S4C and not Channel 4 as it was installed to transmit to Wales, not Wirral and Liverpool. That might have changed now. Moel-Y-Parc still doesn't cover all areas despite it's presence. There were lots of these smaller TV repeaters about in the days of analogue, most not on big masts. One or two appear to have been unofficial, set up by people to help locals out.
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  39. It sounds better than DABradio. The problem is often to do with sound compression and overdriven clipping audio in the fight between stations to sound the loudest. Sadly, DAB stations are doing this now and with very low MONO bitrates, it sounds absolutely rubbish.
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  40. every single PMR install i have seen since the 90s has the same problem with brackets.
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  41.  @ianmason.  You should see how many nuclear fallout shelters there are! I have built and installed lots of equipment in them since the 80s. If anyone is in the North West, there is one under the council building extension in Ellesmere Port town centre. Access via a door from the car park that looks like it goes in to the offices, or via a manhole in the car park that has a 5ft diameter concrete tube running about 20ft on an angle. Inside is a submarine door as I call it - the room is tiled and has a brush with hose attached on the wall ! Down there is a command and control centre, air/water purifiers and storage and a diesel generator and storage. There is a room with bunkbeds and a kitchen, toilets and storage. This was completed in around 1991. Access down the main stairs leads to a thick door hinged on the right. On entering the shelter, rooms to the right are beds, then the escape tunnel and tiled room with showers, toilets and a kitchen area. On the left after entering from the main door are air purification, water treatment and storage, generator. Straight ahead is a large room of about 20ft by 25ft with various computer equipment and radios. This has all been updated since. Some of the aerials on the council buildings were connected at one point. Many shelters existed like this, but were demolished. One or two still exist.
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  42. No one uses KM in the UK, we are still in Miles and Miles per Hour, we also use GBP or £ as currency, not Dollars or $ as people from the UK often start quoting incorrectly.
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  43. You would have to look at the efficiency of the transmitter, modulator and amplifier, then any additional equipment in use. I would guess that site has a 3phase 415v supply and a 1.5KW AM TX and all the equipment probably takes 4 times that. How about 7KW ? It would be like leaving a shower on all day!!! Expensive. Over £100 a day.
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  44. On 70cm i can get the Isle of Man using 5watts in to a 8dB vertical. I'm around 100miles away. On 2m i can get further than that. It depends on height. With Meshtastic on 868MHz my range is less than a mile in some directions - but i can get people mobile on Winter Hill from 40+miles away using a 5dB aerial on a bedroom windowsill. Another person is 5miles away 200ft up in a flat.
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  45. When I was about 14 I started messing about with building TXs using a PCB kit from Tandy. I bought a Pantec Hobbykit, which was a push-pull oscillator on 106MHz using 2x 2n3055, later replaced on my own bigger printed circuit board with 4 x 2n3866, fed in to a dipole. It was HORRIFIC, no RF filtering, never knew about that then, plus loud splattering audio. I managed to block a whole streets TVs and used to talk to friends on a Multimode 2 CB, which also could be heard over everything. The problem was, two CBers lived within 300ft, one with a Sigma 4 and another with Sirio type aerial, so they were getting watched. What I didn't know at the time was the Radio Amateur 4 houses away was going to get a very unexpected call one Saturday night as I was playing music. A Rover 3500 police car and transit van turned up and the people kicked his door in. He was a bank manager! I had to hide the board between the lagging jacket on the tank and pull the dipole in from a back window. I later went on to get a Class A licence, qualifications in RF & electronics engineering and realise how bad all those kits were.
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  46. So do I for versatility and not having to keep changing aerials in tests, but they have a lower gain than a dedicated aerial tuned to a specific frequency. I prefer the Grid Type antennas and used a 4 stack dipole array for years on TV. Far more reliable than a flimsy TV aerial, it also had around the same gain figures but had a wider acceptance angle and a cardioid pattern. Handy for picking up more than one TX. It was just a piece of mesh and 4 "X" shaped elements with a built in phasing harness. For horizontal polarisation the "X" elements stood vertical one above the other, so the longest side of the reflector was vertical. Vertical polarisation meant having it as [X X X X]. Great aerials.
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  47. I would love 29mpg all the time in the town. For a relatively "small petrol turbo" I get between 28 and 30. It is so annoying as the fumes out of it are way more harmful than my diesel which gives 50mpg in town, but then takes 2 gallons of diesel to burn off all the soot, so a false economy now. All part of the plan to try and make cars less efficient, more expensive to run and to try and get people buying milk floats.
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  48. My kenwoos th42e was brilliant with wideband mod!
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  49. It's not the same thing, you need to consider they are only around 100mWatts RF output. On 868MHz that doesn't go far in a built up area, it needs to be high up or using a really good aerial, or both. Walkie talkies can be 5Watts RF and work down nearer 440MHz. RF at different frequencies works very different in different locations. My favourite band in 4M or 70MHz for base to mobile coverage, nothing beats it! DABradio should have used that band.
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  50. Doesn't matter that much as you will not hear anything of interest. RG213 is fine as an aerial high up without obstruction is more important. You need to consider what you will be listening to and make sure the aerial covers the frequencies.
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  51. mb21 and the RA has a list of who uses which site
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  52. Part of Betwys-Y-Coed never had TV or radio - not sure if they have relays now. They only just had phones and when internet took off around 1995, speeds were 4-5Kbps using Demon, or attempting to via 14K4 and 28K8 modems. I used to go on holiday every year and stay near a farm, so got to know the family that run it. They couldn't even get MW stations unless they hooked up the radio to miles of fence. We did that with a CB one day and the result was amazing from about 3miles of barbed wire running 3ft off the road, then up a hill. There were no mobiles back then and no VHF radio, SATTV was not common.
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  53. Urban Legend unfortunately, heard that one before. We know you're only repeating an adapted story because you say "I think" after a very important part as a way of excusing what you claim. Maybe we should do a video on Urban Legends! How many people do you think tell the SAME old stories just with a few changes. It's funnier to finish the story as someone is telling it, they panic and start elaborating on the lies.
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  54. You must be about 130!
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  55. What made you go for inverted L on MW? I used a 180ft long wire from a tall building down to nearly ground at a 45degree angle, an inverted V from the corner of a building and 180ft horizontal between two buildings that were 120ft tall. The best for around a 30mile local coverage using 100Watts on MW was the vertical. The inverted V wasn't much different. The horizontal was not as good for local. SW sounds interesting to try. Many pirates I listened to were around 6205KHz. What I don't like is people that bought amateur radio equipment and put it on SSB, it limits the audience compared to AM. For VHF I used 65Watts in to a slim jim antenna and due to the location was able to get a 40mile radius. Using colinears meant less coverage due to the radiation angle, so it was a trade-off between loads of ERP firing up to the stars, or less gain but a blanket coverage. Radio is for experimenting with ! Tell us more about the SW set up.
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  56. I only got in to amateur radio through CB and pirate radio. I used to tune about on a radio when I was younger and heard music and people having a laugh and knew it wasn't a legal station. After a year of contacting the station when I was at school, they met me and let me go and have a look. I was SO disappointed!!! I am not sure what I was expecting, but the station was in a flat and consisted of a record deck, tape player and a home built transmitter. I remember it was a PCB on the living room floor with other bits of pcb glued on the top and components all soldered on and a bit of coax going up to a dipole on a chimney. Power output was 25Watts. It was powered by a CB power supply and there was a mixer, headphones and mic. It sounded really good on air, but I was expecting some fancy studio! I started learning more and put my own TX together, wiping out a whole street of TVs. Over a few months I refined it, taught myself more and even built a stereo encoder. I was never in to the music side of it then, I just etched PCBs and bought all the bits from my local electronics shop. I then moved in to aerial design, audio processing and really went wild. By this time, raves were becoming popular, so I got in to the dance/trance/techno stuff. I had a few near misses, but was never caught.
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  57. Good job they didn't know about people using amateur radio equipment to tx/rx... loads of people listened to police up until around 2004 around here. They didn't realise other frequencies were used and locals used scramblers. I had a kenwood th42e in 1994 that didn't only cover 430-440 if you voided the warranty and modified it. Imagine the chaos we would have now with all the cheap Baofeng radios.
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  58. I can't tell you how much i dislike those lindenbladd type antennas! In my experience they are not efficient and can easily be outperformed by most other types. A few stacked dipoles outperforms them using much lower power. Circular Polarisation is not effective at VHF. Why have a massive minus dB gain and have to put 6 times the power up the coax, then have slanted radiation which just doesn't work well.
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  59. The problem is that people are being scammed by suppliers now - just as they were with the RaspberryPi. Boards going for £6.99 and now being sold for £25 each. People are buying them all up, stockpiling and selling at 3-4 times the price, similar to the 49p Quansheng programming leads going for £10-£15 each! The best thing to do is NOT BUY for a while, make greedy people stockpiling regret it when they can't sell the boards on.
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  60. Forget it for low power radio station broadcasts. Use a dipole or make a SlimJim that's 2.2m tall, this gives far superior local coverage to a dipole. It depends how low power the TX is. 100mWatts will not get you that far in a built up area, but will if the antenna is on a hill. The only thing to eliminate dead-spots is way more power.
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  61. I also had a 40channel mid band rig, AM. It was hooked up to a DV27 in the loft on a biscuit tin with loads of tin foil. I also hid mine behind the tank in the airing cupboard!!! The threat of detection was real enough, especially when a neighbour reported you. I had one visit later when I had a 40ch FM radio. The man in the van went next door and listened to me on every channel using his modified Pye Pocketphone or something very similar. He looked at the licence, come back and said that it was the neighbour's TV. Years later I got a Multimode 2 and then a UNIDEN 2830 I had many contacts on for years. I also had some wild aerials from dipoles to silver rods. Unfortunarly a 5/8 wabe on a 30ft pole blew down. I started using a linear amp at one point and was obliterating TVs and radios a few roads away. I was using a temporary aerial in the garden and one night heard a commotion. A radio amateur two houses away was having his door kicked in by RIS and police. They had tracked it to the wrong house. A few years after moving from there I took my Class B and then my Class A licences, but found amateurs really boring old people. I preferred CB for the people I spoke to, amateurs just wanted to bore everyone about what they had, radio and electronics etc, not everyone wants to talk about all that every day. I prefer data modes now.
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  62. Your lecturer was correct. It was used for years. Hidden in plain sight, no one would suspect a huge long powerline was a VLF antenna too.
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  63. Not the first pirates they helped! What happened to them as they made some really good amateur gear. None of their equipment was used for licenced people - it was only authorised Home Office type vendors that were able to do that. British Gas used Pye Westminsters and got blocked out one whole weekend in 1986/7 by a station near Liverpool, a DJ called Mike Hughes went on 106.2MHz. The whole PYE range was great, starting with the Cambridge. You could just alter a couple of parts and have it on any of the bands so many were put to use on pirate stations. The PYE linear amps were for preset bands, M1 was 88-108MHz. A lot of early station like Radio Julie used a Pye Cambridge, the person behind it, Andy Davies, died a few years ago. He was the first to send the audio down the Rediffusion cables on an estate so the studio and transmitter could be kept apart.
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  64. There was a Merseyside MW station that saw DTI people and dropped an old fridge off the balcony of the flats! One station found that the door intercom on the block they were in was playing the station audio as the TX was around 100Watts on Medium Wave.
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  65. There were experiments with AM Stereo around 30 years ago, nothing ever developed, but it did sound quite good!
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  66. AM is a mode of modulating a carrier...just like FM or SSB, CW, Data etc. AM is not the frequency or band. You can have a 1458KHZ FM or SSB transmitter.
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  67. It's actually quite boring inside them! A few racks with equipment in plain cases, a few power supplies, a backup system with batteries...trays with coax and a few circulators and diplexers, it's a right let-down. The newer ones might have computers or a phone. One in Wales had it's own BT phone inside, but it sounded like the person using it was in a cave due to the brick and concrete building. The most exciting thing i found in one was a 15year old chicken pot noodle, a screwdriver and wire cutters. The Home Office ones were more secure with electric fences, some not even switched on, cctv and alarms hooked up to BT RedCare. One used for police had ANPR cameras! Not that exciting inside really, i am not sure what people expect.
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  68. Good idea, but not practical due to the channel utilisation. A couple of people doing a voice call would flatten the network. In the North West I can pick you up at times via repeaters/nodes, but if people start sending anything the channel is full.
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  69. Don't see the point, it was like when my local substation broke and the whole area was without power. Massive groups of people took to the streets with torches walking up and down. Very very odd behaviour. Everyone will just be asking what happened and block the network completely.
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  70. We already have that, 4G and 5G which is far cheaper than setting up a company to manage a service and equipment plus licences. Mobile phone companies are already offering widespread WiFi from phone masts now. It would have been a great idea to try 20 years ago, but there isn't a demand now unless you live in some remote area and want to set up a 4G/5G to WiFi repeater, in which case you could just set up a phone repeater and get a better service without any licence problems.
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  71. It is a legal requirement for site operators to know what they have operating as they get called when there is a problem. Any loss of service causes a problem and interference is a legal issue. Everything is licenced and the operators and RA check regularly. They also do spot checks. In the days of pagers around 94 i was at a hilltop site in Wales when the RA turned up to do field strength tests. A VHF pager was splattering and when i let them in the building they found the 10Watts from the TX was going via a 400Watt RF amp in to their own aerial on the mast - around 137MHz. They had the site owner and company rep there within 45mins and took the amp away. Had they not complied, the equipment was going to be switched off and removed. The way the sites work is that you have a few wideband VHF and UHF aerials for general use. You can use your own or you can use a wideband RX one for VHF and another for UHF and TX through your own. There are circulators fitted, but it depends what room is left. The old PMR repeaters would use a common receive aerial at the top of the masts and TX on their own. That's because the common aerial would be a 68-88MHz, 160-180MHz for example, or 440-460MHz, so never cut for one frequency, but good enough in that location. That was only one part of the mast and buildings. There were relays, links, commercial stations and 70cm / 2m repeaters in some. Now they have TETRA and Cellular. Sites i went to were never alarmed either. It was just a case of being issued with keys. One site had about 8 padlocks all joined to each other and wrapped around a gate, you opened your own to get in! Sadly, pirates would install equipment on some of them with 10GHz links, steal electric and splatter and interfere.
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  72. Did you ever know about ECHELON, the taps that were put on lines, Radio Communications Agency installing SDRs in 1994 so they could remotely monitor the spectrum and direction find in each area, or Security Services installing their SDRs with transmit capability? The SDR cover was blown by a news channel in the UK in around 2007, and the story was that local WiFi was being monitored to protect people and inform them if they were using a weak password. The real story was that it was for "packet injection" and repurposing WiFi equipment for surveillance purposes, not to mention snoop on people and attack those that "air-gapped" computers thinking it would keep them safe! There was a lot going on in BT exchanges and there still is to this day. Don't ever think that phoning a charity to report a crime or using 141 protected your identity, your full details were still logged, it just didn't appear on your phone bill. Police used to abuse their position and that of others, or use Special Constables, who worked for BT, to perform checks on numbers for example. Nothing was ever logged.
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  73. Well I can tell you that is nonsense, all in your head. Forces have their own staff to do that sort of thing, they NEVER call in outsiders to deal with their networks. Anyone who has served in the forces will tell you this. Why lie?
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  74. Don't bother, you are 30 years too late! There is nothing interesting to listen to, only aircraft, marine, amateur and the odd shop security radio if not DMR. Absolute waste of money now. There are NO secret frequencies!
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  75. I had a QSL from Radio Fax on 6205KHz i think.
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  76. So did I - but mine was a week ago, they are in UK Customs right now!
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  77. Police in the North West caught people near a cemetary by giving out calls relating to UFO sightings in the early 90s. As people turned up, they were searched.
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  78. AM is a mode of modulating a carrier. It is the frequency that gives good coverage and the required properties.
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  79. SCR? As in Storeton Community Radio on 1026KHz? Anyone from the North West will remember that station from around 1982 onwards, then NCR North Coast Radio 1350KHz and Radio Merseywaves 1242KHz. All had fairly good coverage from different blocks of flats. One of the best was Mersey Heights in Tranmere, Wirral. That had outstanding views for miles. It was possible to see the Winter Hill TX, also down the East Lancs Road and across to Southport and Wales. I remember the panic when an electric company thought people were stealing electric by running wires from the roof on the flats down to lamp posts, they had no idea it was a medium wave aerial and were up on the roof touching it. In the North West everyone remembers Radio Julie 104.8 stereo and Slag Off International 105.3 who blocked the gas board in 1985 by using 106.2MHz. This was in the Liverpool Echo. A lot of the people involved in Pirate Stations in the North West have died. Famous people like Andy Davies who inspired a lot of people - then the larger than life Dave Collins, who ended up on Internet Radio Stations. Many stations were raided each year.
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  80. Not always accurate or covering every detail. The remote monitoring stations used SDRs from around 1992, they were located at every BT phone exchange building and monitored the spectrum in each area. Pirates were identified quickly as there was a setting to only show new stations that were not known. They were also combined to give direction finding. This same system is still is in use today and is VERY accurate now, accurately locating people within a few metres. I have seen it in action for locating people jamming emergency services. Once a report was made, the source was identified and located within 30mins. It used to concentrate on anything 4M and above, not it does HF and in to the microwaves. The equipment is also used by GCHQ to monitor WiFi and was tested in a program of WiFi interception by monitoring home WiFi in a particular area and using packet injection etc. WiFi has a number of vulnerabilities so it is possible to force disconnects to get a password for example. Security Services were using this and still do. The official line in the Press when someone found out was that they were looking who had not secured their WiFi to try and help them improve security. Your local BT exchange has a lot of extra equipment installed used by many agencies...look at the aerials on the roof that are not for mobiles or TETRA.
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  81. That should be a dynamic feature of the software and other equipment should build up a list. Don't forget Radio Amateurs have had the Packet Radio network since 1988 using TNCs over radios. LoRA software could be developed a lot as most of the errors were made with amateurs and fixed.
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  82. This is the problem that the Storeton TV TX had when it first went online. Locals got no signal and it was a big story in the newspapers, but a bit further away it was full strength. It was the wrong type of antenna in use. Once changed to tilt the radiation pattern down correctly, it covered the required areas. It was an example of poor design and understanding of RF. People think RF comes straight out and all around. It doesn't, it can be steered and set at different angles depending what the installation is for. That's why phone masts tilt the radiation pattern down to give a more blanket coverage with a lower range. The same for broadcast stations, you don't want a fancy 6dB colinear with a 30-35degree takeoff , you want a simple aerial like a slim jim, J pole or mixed polarisation dipole that will cover the local area and not win a DX award. Sometimes people will get NO signal or a very low one due to multipath interference, two of the signal arriving at the same time effectively trying to cancel each other out! That can be rectified by moving the aerial, or in some cases fitting two aerials and a splitter and messing with them. I used to have two very long Group C/D aerials pointing at Winter Hill to get OnDigital when it first come out. I tried them phased side by side, then stacked for more gain one above the other etc. To get shut of multipath I spaced them side by side and then moved one aerial back about 2ft and it cured it. I also fitted a masthead preamp to overcome coax losses. There are lots of interesting things you can do with aerials.
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  83. I always wanted to run on Medium Wave, but lost interest. I did have a 1 watt oscillator and got a few miles on a long wire, but no way of amplifying the RF. Years later I realise I could have used low cost Audio MOSFETs. I even tried a 6L6G in to two 807 valves, but that was a disaster too.
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  84. You should have gone down the M53 to Clatterbridge Hospital. They have a very small licenced 1602KHz AM hospital radio transmitter. It's a box in the car park and a small loaded pole antenna of about 30ft on a post! It does the job across the site and sound quality is really good. It was at the car park were the injections were being given a few years ago...can't remember the name of the building itself.
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  85. It would be for the people living near that getting blasted with 1500Watts of RF day and night. There is no way it wouldn't affect their health.
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  86. It makes NO difference unless the glass has some metallic coating or you put it near a metal frame. On glass it makes no difference to RF.
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  87. Believe that and you believe anything. BT Engineers would not have used the restaurant in a building, if you ever worked for them you would know why... BT did not deal with the Data Links or IT side of things, it was a subcontractor and still is.
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  88. 2.1dBi = 0dBd so no gain!
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  89. Stacking beams one on top of the other is for gain, handy for longer distances. You might only get 3dB more, but that is double, so worth it. Putting them side by side tends to be for dealing with reflections, you can slide one beam forwards or backwards to eliminate multipath interference - or it is to tighten the angle of reception but keep the same gain. Think of changing from floodlight to torch beam. I don't think they would use two lots of RX. I used both methods to overcome rubbish signal when Winter Hill was on reduced power as it was being changed to Digital. 2 x 10 element group CD wasn't good enough. 1 with no preamp meant no CH4/5 and breaking up ITV. A preamp got ITV and CH4 was still bad. I tried the 2 x 10 element stacked by the length of the dipole. Then i got 2 x 18 element and that was better. I had an indoor preamp at the time, but you can't amplify something that isn't there. I used a masthead preamp and got a good picture for years. Others were being ripped off, a neighbour paid £250 for this huge aerial and coax and it kept breaking up. They even had one about 6ft long pointing to Wales and that was no good. My TV aerial now is a log periodic with amp on it that's on the pole supporting a washing line in the garden. Perfect signal. It was only temporary after getting shut of VirginMedia for doubling my bill, but it works really well, so i left it,
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  90. WOW, I remember listening to Laser 558 !
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  91. I might have to mention another system you are probably not aware of that was given the project name "CELLDAR". This was tested in the mid 1990s and a Gov Dept using a company name of Roke Manor Research had various test facilities, including a large stately home. The basic idea was to do something with the reflected waves from high frequency transmissions emitted from cellular phone transmitter sites. The reflected waves built up a 3D model that was fairly crude, but showed anything moving within the space monitored as it interrupted it. It looked more like a waterfall display you see today on a SDR. The early tests showed a blob moving, not even the shape of a person, there was no real definition. The aim at first was to use it for passive aircraft RADAR, but it didn't work due to the frequency and downward tilt on directional aerials. Lower frequencies from broadcast and TV stations could never work. It had to be a short wavelength. It improved to a point of being able to detect people and vehicle shapes and worked in built up areas better. The project was stopped as the results could never be improved upon and would never give the definition required.
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  92. You could certainly apply for licences and put different radio services up like PMR, digital community repeater services, phone relays, point to point microwave services etc. I still can't believe no one living by that mast suffered any health issues as a result of living next to high levels of RF. Even working near a TX or mast, you are only allowed to when power levels are dropped right down and it's only for a set time in each hour of a day for example. Imagine sitting in your house or garden getting 1500Watts minimum transmitted at you all day and night. When there were multiple stations the risk would have been far greater.
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  93. It would be possible to use it for RX, but due to public safety not on TX. There would be issues with joins in lines, breakages, constant impedance changes etc. What you might like to look at is how HV electrical cables were used as VLF aerials. All those pylons... Many things are "hidden in plain sight". Some fields have miles and miles of fences, trying measuring for RF on them with a frequency counter etc.
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  94. It depends what he means by monitoring. RF or Internet? Internet is monitored at every DataCentre, connections in and out of the UK and Internet exchange centres. RF monitoring is via the existing network of SDRs that are in nearly every BT phone exchange and have been since the early 1990s. They can mess with WiFi through them, but OFCOM also uses the various monitoring stations for Spectrum Compliance. He probably doesn't tell you what he does as he doesn't want you telling everyone on the Internet.
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  95. It depends on the aerial. If you only want local coverage, a single aerial with medium to high angle radiation pattern will cover the locals if it is low down. If it was high up, a downward tilt or something like a Slim Jim or J pole would be better to give a blanket coverage and not get too far. No need for higher gain aerials there.
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  96. Yet another Urban Legend - heard that one before too, with various combinations of articles and containers. All very entertaining, but once you hear different people telling the same stories you wonder why. Is it for attention or trying to be part of something?
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  97. Very true, you could use a few simple components. A coil around a ferrite road, tuning capacitor (not even always needed), a diode, capacitor and crystal earpiece hooked up to a long wire and earth. I bet a lot of the locals had tuned circuits rigged up to get a bit of free power!!! Inductively couple free power.
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  98. Test the antenna on a radio with SWR meter! If it works on 2m it will work on 70cm as they are directly related. If it doesn't work on 70cm then it can not be a reputable retailer.
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  99. Google and other youtube videos, he just compiles it all in one place for us all which is handy. Many would never think of searching for some subjects,
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  100. I can't imagine the sort of health issues from living within 50ft of a 1.5KW minimum AM TX. Did anyone ever have any issues! What about the interference from them ? I bet you could hear the stations on everything.
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  101. That's not the only thing they were getting up to! I attended various trade shows and security events and still meet vendors who like to boast about who their customers are. Merseyside is a very big customer of companies that sell surveillance equipment. They have spent millions. Security Services used to have two floors in the OLD HQ building. They have bought and used quite a few IMSI catchers, illegally, at demonstrations and gatherings to gather your info and also parked up with them by houses of interest to monitor mobile calls - yes, digital and encrypted. They don't do things by the book, and also spent a lot on Cellebrite software to get in to your phone if you are taken in. Other software is general inspection like EnCase. They also like the database one i have forgotten the name of, it plots cell sites, who called who, who must know who and takes feeds from other systems. They love buying night vision cameras, drones with night vision & IR, they also use cameras to "look through" walls to see where occupants of buildings are and leave the odd car or van on various streets. One they got caught out with was an Iceland home delivery van just parked up. As if no one would notice. Welcome to the World of Surveillance. Most people never give things like this a second thought, if they see an aerial or camera, or people snooping about.
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  102. In the 90s they might, but all my cars have had the radio aerials in the rear window or actually as part of the heater element in earlier ones. My current one has two elements above the heated window for DAB and one for VHF, both horizontal which is annoying. I have to be careful with choice of car camera or it generates enough RF to knock the radio off! The Blackview doesn't as it links the front and rear cameras with coax and cases are screened. I don't like tilted aerials, it is not that much more expensive to fit two beams or get a circular polarised aerial. That can be as simple as the type Juice FM/Capital in Liverpool had on the cathedral, it was a dipole that bent around in a square shape to give horizontal and vertical. No idea on the make. That is more efficient, but needs the power doubling to it in order to provide the same as what it would be on a single antenna because of the -2.5dB gain. Maybe that's why so many use the lazy method of putting the aerials at 45degrees. The other problem with this is loss, cross polarisation loss is 20dB or more, so with the tilted one, you're always going to have a 10dB loss between your vertical and horizontal and a slanted aerial. I would always go for two aerials and give vertical and horizontal and turn the power up a bit, depending on the licence! Dipoles could be spaced from the pole to use it as a reflector too. It all depends on what's required.
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  103. It's near the dual carriageway that goes past wallasey village station, nearer moreton.
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  104. You will hate the poor quality of DABradio then, it's revolting. I remember years ago getting my first DABradio home and thinking it was going to be brilliant after watching all the TV adverts. What a disappointment to find stations in MONO at 32 and 64Kbps. Some were 192Kbps and a dance station was 128Kbps, but the more that appeared, the more the quality was ruined. Now DAB is in a right state. It is the same adverts being played on every station, but with a few different tunes and jingles for different station names. No one listens to DAB. Even in my cars since 2012 having DABradio is nothing special, it has ALWAYS sounded rubbish, with one exception of KISS FM until that got a lower quality and is now worse than AM radio. It should have been put between 68-88MHz too, a very unused band, but with a really good coverage, especially mobile, compared to up around 200MHz. Badly thought out, terrible audio quality and do you remember that stupid advertising company that did radio and car adverts aimed at "old" people? They put a nice new modern radio in an old case to try and appeal to pensioners, or people with certain conditions that only remembered older style radios, then tried similar with cars - completely bizarre. DAB is a waste of time, I would prefer AM radio quality in the car.
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  105. It sounds odd that you would train AI, it should be able to train itself ! MASC only relied on the KEY, so changing the key would eventually reveal the transmission. Don't be too concerned, GCHQ can still locate and kill the radios if you use them. Every BT phone exchange has SDR equipment that was fitted in the early 1990s and upgraded over the years. Apart from helping monitor the spectrum in each area for OFCOM (who can connect in), identify and locate transmissions, it was also used to mess about with WiFi as it started becoming popular. The cover story in the press if you find it was that the equipment would help locate WiFi with poor or no passwords and help users tighten them up!!! What they meant was - someone found the GCHQ network of SDRs and reported it, the official comment had to be something like this to stop the public knowing what went on. My local BT Exchange still has aerials up and SDRs for this monitoring and messing about, plus it can block signals in certain areas. MASC developed in to the TETRA system we have today. I fitted many boards, repaired them with radios and installed entire systems in the 90s. MASC was good against hobbyists with scanners, but criminals were able to "obtain" codes and input them on radios that had IDs disabled and the lockout and stun feature disabled. People that paid enough still got access.
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  106. For years, many years, the National Grid provided a service whereby you could carry communications along their pylon network. They come clean and started saying they run fibreoptics on them a few years ago, saying it was for Internet. When pylons were installed with mains cables they also had telephony cables running with the earth wires.
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  107. They can be around 100mWatts. Enough to get in to a bigger RF amp.
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  108. Correct, they caught nosey people. I remember listening to police on 100mhz on a clock radio when I was younger. We even had a car radio that covered it. It was AM, but still clear enough and all the car chases were on there, with the old Burndept radios on 451MHz. In the late 1988 I got a Pro-34 from Tandy for 249.99, still got it now in a box. That was for phones and police really, that's why people got them. Police wouldn't be too interested if you were a radio amateur in those days as you had an excuse to have a scanner. I also had a Kenwood TH42e in the 90s and a lot of amateur equipment was capable of being modified easily for different countries. Most amateurs would do a wide band RX and TX mod... It was around 2002 everything went digital around here, so scanner sales dropped. Now, unless you know people, you can not get a radio in test mode on the network or go near Airwave. Criminals get their info direct anyway, so don't need radios.
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  109. I'm more interested in the RADAR systems, what frequency, power and aerials are in use and how they work, plus what the displays look like. A lot of people never get to see this. Is it safe to be near 1KW of RADAR !
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  110. It's not even a very good site due to local hills completely blocking it to large areas. Maybe that's why it was chosen! It covers parts of Liverpool, Wales and Chester, and some parts of Wirral, but there are problems with the other side of the Bidston and Oxton Ridges, hundreds of feet ASL that block all coverage beyond them. I remember the news reports of when the TV transmitter was first switched on and locals were complaining they couldn't receive it. It was later found to be the type of aerials used that were firing the RF upwards and over local areas. Once it was all corrected it was fine. The radio stations that use it don't get out to Wirral or Liverpool too well because of the hills.
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  111. The video that is 40 years too late!!! Scanners are a waste of money and time now as there is nothing of real interest to listen to. Since 2000 there has been nothing much about unless you like listening to airband or marine.
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  112. Another interesting point is that BEFORE 02-Airwave as it was know, there were tests as far back as 1991 with a UK wide analogue system. I remember listening to tests were officers in the North West were "patched through" to officers in the Midlands. From 451MHz to whatever the other frequency was and I was able to hear both sides as it was a talkthrough conversation. This was experimented with for a while and trunking was meant to have been introduced across the UK, but funding stopped it. It was put on hold and encryption was used on radios that needed it and officers were using more and more mobile phones to take jobs and do checks so the public didn't hear. The pans to expand the national linked analogue system just fell apart, then we got TETRA. I think this was after the system called Dolphin Tetra set up throughout the UK and people got really interested in what it could do. I had a Dolphin TETRA handheld radio that worked on what is now DABradio frequencies, known as Band 3 back in 1994. That system allowed me to call a colleague anywhere in the country. It was brilliant, well ahead of Community Repeaters that were all still analogue. Mobile phones did kill off the PMR business!
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  113. The RADAR isn't used now, I remember always seeing that rotating many years ago when I went past. I just didn't know who was seeing the feed from it. Some coastguard aerials used to be on the Liverpool Cathedral together with the aerial farm for PMR, Taxis, utility companies and the current JUICE FM or whatever it is called now on 107.6MHz. There is a transmitter room up there too which is interesting if you get a look inside. It tends to be locked up more now after a Liverpool Solicitor was said to have hidden until after closing time and jumped off the roof. That story was in the national and local press too. Some say it was because of who he was mixed up with and it might not have been what it appeared to be. If you are in Liverpool, go for a tower tour of the cathedral and have a look at the aerials! Take your Meshtastic nodes up there.
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  114. Absolute rubbish and you know it. That sounds more like a swingers club. Why do people have to lie and make up these stories or pass on Urban Legends. If you must lie or pass on Urban Legends, at least make sure no one else has posted the same thing, make it original. What was the name of the company you worked for? I know most people connected with this type of work...
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  115. The UFO thing happened all around the UK, even the north west in a field by a cemetary not far from Arrowe Park Hospital. A message went out, cars drove down a narrow road and were blocked in. They should have all said they were dog walkers. It was in the Liverpool echo in the late 80s or early 90s.
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  116. Can members of the public buy old phone poles? I would love one to concrete in the back garden and then fit some poles with aerials on the top!
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  117. Yes, heard that Urban Legend before too, there is a whole channel with them all. Very popular, it's just odd the way people want to lie and pass these stories off as their own and claim they were involved. If you google for some of the text here you can see most of the Urban Legends are copied from different people, so not all of you were involved in the same thing at the same time in the same place!
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  118. You mean MEDIUM WAVE, AM is a mode of modulating the carrier, just like FM or SSB.
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  119. The loss on the coax is too great, most of the signal will be lost unless you have LMR400 or Heliax. You could get a plastic box and put the PCB in , then use a very short piece of coax and a long USB lead to power it. You would be better off getting a 2inch wide piece of plastic pipe, sticking the board and a 868MHz aerial inside at the top under an end cap, then running a thick USB cable down to power it, or use a thick power lead joined on to a USB plug. Forget the discone, it's not a very good design of antenna. You are better using a dedicated 868MHz antenna. If you are high enough, look at the plans for a Slim Jim and scaled them for 868MHz, make it from a piece of copper wire and connect it to a pigtail and use this inside the pipe with the circuit board. This gives a much better local coverage than those fake "high gain" colinears on sale. I used a SJ on 1090MHz and it was only about 18cm long and 1cm wide. Get experimenting. With LoRa there is no advantage with high gain aerials as they have a much higher angle of radiation, so useless for local blanket coverage compared to the Slim Jim.
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  120. The Urban Legend Channel ! Really? I think it is more of an experiment to see how easily manipulated the audience can be. Tell one Urban Legend and watch countless others appear in the comments. It will be hilarious when someone forgets to check if theirs has been posted and goes and posts the same story as others without realising.
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  121. Almost the same, they were a PDA with a walkie talkie function and could send data and work in a mesh system. Not sure of the frequencies they used now. I was wondering if a patent had died off. I remember some models of mobile phones also had a PTT feature to talk to others locally.
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  122. Yes it can! You can have AM Stereo quite easily, full separation between channels. It was tried and didn't take off as no one saw the need when we had FM Stereo transmitters. The radios would have been more expensive and no one would pay for them. Full tests were carried out. It sounded good too.
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  123. I was about to say that we bounced a 10GHz off the cooling towers at Fiddlers Ferry power station and used both PMR sites and Commercial Radio/TV sites we had keys to through various radio jobs. Seemed a shame to have a spare port on a circulator going up to broadcast antennas.
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  124. Oh I've heard that so many times, another urban legend. There are no houses near to Menwith Hill.
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  125. I can tell you exactly what that was for - HF communications for Embassies. Nothing sinister about it.
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  126. There is no way I would like to have lived that close to a MW transmitter at those sort of power levels. If you had gone a mile or two to Moreton before Wallasey Village train station, you could have had a look at the aircraft locator antenna which looks like a huge doughnut with lots of small aerials. That's always an interesting one.
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  127. National WiFi will never be a thing, the major cable companies do not want you to be able to come and go as you please. They want you tied to contracts. This is why you will never get decent 4G/5G WiFi or Broadband in your home in a City Centre. Many of the companies I contacted said I can have it on my phone, but not with a 4G/5G router and SIM. I would just at the chance to get shut of cable.
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  128. Interesting to see the remote monitoring stations covered. This first started in the early 90s when SDRs were on sale but cost thousands. It was only around 1994 that computer controlled ones were being sold to the public and they were being fitted at BT Exchanges in every town and city to form a monitoring network for the RA. The RIS used it to track pirates interfering with police and ambulance etc. The response to any area was in under 1 hour they could pinpoint the exact location and pay a visit. Around 2007 the newspapers run various articles about how week WiFi passwords could cause a problem and how "special monitoring equipment" at BT Buildings could monitor the airwaves and locate people. This was of course a cover for what GCHQ was up to with the various methods of repurposing equipment! They could use a nearby WiFi point to transmit to a device of interest, or monitor for it - or use the remote stations for packet injection attacks. I only know of one case that was used in. GCHQ were using de-authentication attacks and playing about with WiFi. They don't need to do it much now as every bit of data in and out of the UK goes through GCHQ and is stored. So don't think your VPNs are private! As for the SDRs, if you can get in a BT phone exchange, have a look around and you will find them. There is still one in the middle of an exchange in Chester, UK.
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  129. Loads of people used to block GB3MP too in the 80s. One was identified as he didn't realise he had the PTT pressed when he was talking to his mate. We got his name and worked out where he was from what he was saying. Strangely he was never heard from again. Shame on him for being a radio technician with a company in the North West in the 90s. Awful ginger hair too.
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  130. I did when it first started as Talk Radio, Ian Collins was a presenter that went on at night when all that rubbish sport stopped. He did a phone in and chat show and started around 2am to 6am. He built up an amazing listenership and it was really good in those days. Remember that annoying jingle "Talk Radio - write it down" and "Otex ear Drops", then "nod32"...
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  131. ANOTHER Urban Legend, we have already had that one! Think of another.
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  132. So he wasn't working at Rugby, didn't help pirate stations, isn't your friend and you have no contact with him - you just "believe" all that. Any time someone says "I believe" or "he couldn't talk about it" we know it's rubbish. Don't forget, it was mainly radio amateurs that worked at Rugby and all well known. Backgrounds were fully checked and any activities of a criminal nature would mean termination of employment. I know you want to tell us all about pirate stations on ships, but that's not what this video is about.
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  133.  @ToomasTelling  DABradio is finished in the UK, it failed because of - 1. Advertisers 2. Poor Audio Quality 3. Choice of different stations When it first appeared, the audio quality was brilliant as bitrates were high, some as high as 320kbps stereo on the BBC test stations. As time went on, it was all monetised and people looked at ways to get back their investment and make money. It went away from being a method of transmitting stations to one of selling advertising, making every channel play automated music with adverts and a bit of talking over the top. Many of my local DAB stations play the same music from the same feed, but change the announcements. Why just have 4 stations on a multiplex for example, when you would have 12 or 24 all running really low audio bitrates. That is why no one listens now. Who wants MONO audio at a bitrate and audio quality lower than a standard AM radio. In North West UK if you listen at home or in a car to stations on 88-108MHz FM Stereo, the audio quality is really good. Listen on DABradio and you get thin or tinny MONO with 16kbps to 64kbps and it is "quiet", plus there is no processing, no dynamic range, no compression etc, so unusable in cars. Most stations rely on streaming. DABradio was a "gap filler" while Streaming Services were improved and people started to use them more thanks to unlimited data on phones etc. I now just stream music in the car, I don't bother with DABradio and only use normal radio if there is no coverage on the phone! The choice of frequency up around 200MHz was odd too, if they had used 68-88MHz the coverage would have been vastly improved, especially for mobile use. Less transmitters and links would have been required. I use 4M amateur band (70MHz) and the coverage is really good compared to 2m and 70cm for example.
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  134. Overhead mains cables as in National Grid power distribution via those lovely pylons...hidden in plain sight.
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  135. 4:54 that drives me mad, the aerial for Capital has been mounted upside down. It's changed in recent years as it only had one element and the power level was a lot lower. 378Watts is odd, maybe to overcome the length of feeder loss and the -dB gain that aerial has, they are horribly inefficient and I am not sure why people still use them. All that wasted power to radiate the same signal I can get from a mixed polarisation aerial with 100 Watts to vertical and horizontal.
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  136. RF circuits should be in a metal and grounded enclosure. I intend to line one of the Bender cases with a stick on foil and grounding it. I will also use an adapter to add some filtering to the end of my USB power lead before it is plugged in.
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  137. With all those stations hooked up to the same audio feeds, just with different adverts played and different announcements. it really is in a terrible state now, I was SO disappointed when I got a DABradio after it first come out. I expected what was lied about on the false DABradio adverts about "crystal clear sound" and "Great audio Quality". I got lots of stations, only two local ones in stereo and everything else was mono, some sounding worse than MW. I had DABradio as standard in my car and used to listen to KISS as the bitrate was 160kbps and it was stereo. That last a few months and it went to 128kbps, then 112kbps and now I think it's 64kbps MONO. No one wants that rubbish quality. I wanted a DARradio with TWO speakers (for stereo) and could never understand why so many of the Pure radios were sold with just one. They knew everything was going to be low quality mono, so no point selling a radio with two speakers! Advertisers lied about DABradio to promote sales and they misled people. Many were fined and forced to stop lying about the audio quality, coverage and claims of "interference free crystal clear audio".
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  138. You are definitely NOT being honest about working as a police officer then. If you were, you would have more insight. It was well known as officers were told what they should and should not say at a certain time, around the 90s when scanners appeared because they were more affordable. It was well known criminals used them to get an early warning when they didn't have anyone on the payroll to warn them. Many people caught had scanners, but before that they stole radios such as the Burndept handheld ones, or modified amateur radio equipment. Some even transmitted to block everyone. Please don't talk rubbish and claim to be something you were not.
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  139. Some police used scramblers in the radios, they knew in 1988 that people were listening in. It was a crude speech inversion and they were available for most of the PMR radios in use.
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  140. Very interesting, a friend had an RS number starting 541 and that was in 1982/3, so it times the letter from the SWL to before that. I'm amazed they got away with the pirate stations, usually they were caught fairly quick.
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  141. In the UK you need Planning Permission from your local Council. If it was in the middle of nowhere, not near roads or houses, you might get away with just doing it, but you run the risk of aircraft hitting it. It depends where it is,
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  142. It's no longer used!!!
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  143. You can pirate on DAB so all is not lost! A bit more complicated and expensive, but you could get those old 10GHz links back out. On my TX aerial in the NW i used to be able to RX Dimension FM and IBC .
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  144. Google and youtube and great for that.
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