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

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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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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It's near the dual carriageway that goes past wallasey village station, nearer moreton.
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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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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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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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They can be around 100mWatts. Enough to get in to a bigger RF amp.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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You mean MEDIUM WAVE, AM is a mode of modulating the carrier, just like FM or SSB.
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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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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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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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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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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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Oh I've heard that so many times, another urban legend. There are no houses near to Menwith Hill.
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I can tell you exactly what that was for - HF communications for Embassies. Nothing sinister about it.
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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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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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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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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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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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ANOTHER Urban Legend, we have already had that one! Think of another.
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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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@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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Overhead mains cables as in National Grid power distribution via those lovely pylons...hidden in plain sight.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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It's no longer used!!!
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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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Google and youtube and great for that.
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