I’m not sure what radio you’re talking about because I was vague to begin with. I meant cheap FRS radios but couldn’t remember if those initials were correct when I posted that so I just said “walkie talkie.” FRS radios use 462 to 467 MHz, CBs use 27 MHz.
Then I guess I phased a question poorly for General Questions. Sorry, Joey.
Lets re-set: Imagine a film crew is filming a commercial or a movie down the street and they are all shouting directions/commands into these motorola 2-way radios. Maybe you are curious, maybe you have too much time on your hands?
You have done NOTHING WRONG AT ALL… but wouldn’t it be fun to hear all the chatter between the Gaffer and the Best Boy?
So… is there any base station out-of-the-box that you could buy to listen in? Googling radios, yeah I’m getting that 1000 frequencies as easily possible… But if only one is being broadcast on close-by and regularly and you have it set to scan
for strong nearby signals… could you listen in? Would they really be programming these things for high-level security? (I mean… Why Bother…?)
No. I’ve heard quite a few of these chatterings. It’s either very dull stuff about where to put or find lights and cables, or inane d-baggetry.
Don’t know if it’s still done, but scanner enthusiasts used to pair a frequency counter with a scanner and the scanner would tune the frequency that the counter was picking up. If you aren’t aware, a frequency counter is a very broadband radio that will receive a radio transmission and determine its frequency by measurement. This can then be used to tune a scanner.
I have worked in reality TV. My suspicion is that this show is faked. As mentioned above, the contractor would have to sign a release. What crooked contractor would? Not to mention the trespassing through other people’s yards, and the “chase cars”–these aren’t cops and there’s no way they do anything dangerous or illegal. Insuance wouldn’t have it.
I’m sure it will come as no surprise to learn that some “reality shows” like Duck Dynasty are in fact completely scripted–they are performing lines writen for them. Not all reality shows are like this–I have never worked on Deadliest Catch or Intervention, but they are very documentary AFAIK.
As for the radios, I don’t know what section of he spectrum they use, but every time I’ve used production radios they were 10-channel Motorolas. Anyone with the same radio could listen in but it isn’t usually interesting. Once in a while you run into other productions nearby and you work out a deal on channel sharing but it happens surprisingly infrequently.
ETA, I don’t know if this is true, but I suspect that whatever spectrum is used for production radios is specific to production radios. I’ve never heard cops, construction workers, kids, or anything but film crews on those channels.
They don’t have to hire actors to play shoddy contractors. They find contractors who took someone’s money, ripped up the house, and then disappeared.
So they sting the contractor. Then they tell them that they can either get filmed helping to fix the mess they made, get help from the crew on hand, and sign the release and be on the show, and in a few days it’s all over. Or they can walk away and face further legal action from the homeowner.
Most shitty contractors are shitty because they’re lazy. If you could get the whole miserable job from months ago that you skipped out on completed in a few days, all with extra help from the film crew, it makes sense to sign the release, be on the show and finish the job. Of course there are guys that tell them to fuck off, those guys never appear on the show.
It’s easier and cheaper to hire actors. With actors you never have to worry about someone not signing a release, or losing the pursuit vehicles in traffic, or a crewmember breaking an ankle or doing property damage while trespassing. Reality TV is made cheaply. You would hever risk blowing the budget for an episode on someone who wouldn’t sign.
To reprise on something that Habeed wrote earlier. You can get GSM and CDMA cellular phones that have a PTT (push to talk) mode. Instead of making a phone call to another phone, the system sets it up so that there is a permanent connection between a set of phones, but without any traffic running in the cell. Instead of dialling a number to talk, you simply push the talk button, and the phone works just like a walkie-talkie, with a half-duplex communication, received by all the handsets in the group. But the cellular network takes care of the traffic. You don’t have range issues, and the traffic is just as secure as any other phone call on the network. You do all need PTT capable handsets, and to be on the same carrier.
I haven’t looked at this technology in years, but it seems that 2.5G and 3G have also implemented the capability.
There’s an App for Android phones that does that. It’s called Zello.
I have a handheld scanner that will monitor any band you tell it to and then log all nearby transmission frequencies for review. Nearby is defined in this case as stronger than average signals. It’s 10 years old at least, so this isn’t anything particularly fancy.
I meant that cheap walkie-talkies usually use CB channel 2, in my experience.
Decades ago I would use that (and violate a few FCC regulations) to avoid missing any of a stand-up comedy radio show while doing pizza delivery. I had a cheap walkie-talkie set that had built-in headset, and I had a CB in my car, so I’d just tune the CB to Channel 2, then use a rubber band on the push-to-talk switch on the mic, and set the mic on the radio speaker on the dashboard, so I could hear by car radio over the walkie-talkie.
Every walkie-talkie I ever bought at Radio Shack used CB Channel 2.
Here’s a lawsuit filed against the show by a contractor, claiming they wouldn’t let him leave without signing the release. I doubt they’d have an actor misuse the court system just to prove the show isn’t faked.
I know nothing of the show in the OP but I have been in the two-way hobby for many years on both the tx’ing side and the monitoring end. There are any number of ways of securing your comms. Like anything else, some are better than others but almost any will deter all but the most determined snoop.
First, there are analog techniques, primarily simple voice inversion and then rolling code inversion. Simple inversion (sounds like this: This link makes noise) is considered trivially easy to defeat by those who do this sort of thing. A newbie wandering into Walmart to buy a scanner may find this impossible. This is an old technique and I haven’t heard voice inversion on the scanner in a long time, perhaps 15 years(?).
Next up are digital methods of crypto and there are very many types. There will be people mumbling about this one article they once read that so-and-so crypto was broken in 1997 (in a lab) and how Motorola’s 40-bit ADP key is so weak you may as well turn it off. Don’t listen to any of this. Take it from me, these are all but unbreakable by individuals or those without access to state and large enterprise-levels of funding, equipment and know-how. Certainly, OP, digital crypto is not being broken by crooked contractors.
Finally, there are ways of preventing the interception of the signal in the first place by using spread spectrum transceivers (direct sequence and frequency hopping). This is often combined with digital encryption and makes for a very secure system. Again, all but unmonitorable.
Back to the TV show, I can’t imagine that CB radios are being used. There are so many good, cheap FM radios available now. CB frequencies (~27MHz) are not well suited to urban or even suburban environments. The antennas need to be large and unwieldy for even the shortest range.
Really, a screenshot of the particular radio in use will clear up a lot of whether the comms are secured.
Quite right, it is a standard feature on many, many scanners. Uniden calls this Close Call and GRE/RadioShack calls (called?) this Signal Stalker.
…wh…whh… What…??? You don’t need a “software defined radio” or “illegal firmware software” “special GSM decoders”! Where do you get this nonsense? It doesn’t even make any sense.
2 way radios… communicating off CELL towers?? Since like, when?
Business radios - let’s say Walmart, may use 154.60000 which is listenable even on the old, '70s Radio Shack analog scanners.
Found one, construction company in Phoenix, Arizona that uses 451.43750 MHz, license is: WQFY581 , and the company name is: CEMEX. The mode is “FM”, not encrypted (I find only specific “hot calls” in police work are encrypted, most are not)
so, an ORDINARY scanner can receive. No “special software”, no “hacking tools” (rolls eyes) needed. You do not need a “software defined radio” (I suspect the commenter has no inkling of what an SDR actually is)
an ordinary scanner that can receive that band will work. You don’t even need one of those $$$$ digital trunk trackers to hear those guys.
I bet those “To Catch a Contractor” aren’t even using business radio that require a license- but maybe using FMRS/GMRS, which are aka “walkie talkies”
they could even be using radio band that a lot of movie/mobile film people use, again, ordinary radio shack scanner.
Scanning can be fun. SDRs can be fun too. But they are not the same thing, and used for completely different things (sometimes!)
I use an SDR, and software, to decode boring stuff I get off of HF radio. HF radio is NOT the same as business radio. HF radio is stuff like shortwave radio, amateur bands, and so on.
Google is at your fingertips…
just do a simple search for business radio frequencies, radioreference (2nd time tonight Ive had to use them in two different threads on here) has listings of all licensed frequencies in any town.
I strongly suggest you might like to go back and re-read the statement you are quoting, and perhaps also re-read my follow-up.
PTT with cell-phones (GSM, CDMA, 2.5G and 3G) was what was being described. This is a well established technology, and in order to crack you would need exactly what Habeed wrote. You are attempting to crack the existing cell-phone traffic. You can’t buy off the shelf equipment to do that, and cracking of the GSM encryption isn’t trivial.
PTT phones are typically special handsets tha have a big PTT button on the side like walkie talkies, and have other design elements that allow them to be used more like walkie-talkies than simple phones. Obviously smartphone apps that reticulate over IP are another option. But your average smartphone isn’t physically designed to operate like a walkie-talkie, so there are compromises.
That was the entire premise of Nextel, now part of Sprint. Their phones worked as regular cell phones (iDEN, not CDMA or GSM) but also had a push-to-talk mode, that for a defined group of users worked as a two way radio with the transmissions handled by the cell towers. Was all the hotness in the late 90s when you’d run into jackasses in the supermarket talking loudly over the two-way. The service is still offered by AT&T and others, but is long past the peak of its popularity.
ETA: or what Francis Vaughan wrote more quickly…
Just because this one guy isn’t an actor does not mean all of them aren’t. Also, lots of so called “actors” have all sorts of real jobs while they wait for their fabled breakthrough role to magically appear. So when this contractor/actor wannabe was called by production and given a chance to be on the TeeVee, he of course agreed, until he realized he was gonna be made to look like a complete dick and refused to sign.
BTW, I’m not necessarily referring to this one guy in the link, but the type of thing I’m describing happens all the time.
Now, back to the radio issue. Not sure if the crew is lying just to get ppl to shut the fuck up during tapings of TV shows, but they make you turn off your phones claiming it interferes with their radios.
These are used, for example, by cab drivers in my area. Rather than the old style radios (which I believe required an FCC license and a big ol’ tower at the office), the drivers all carry a phone that also works like a radio, so when they push to talk every other driver hears what they say. This also allows dispatch duties to be taken on by one of the drivers during slow periods.
I READ your comment, and I do know what PTT is, and No, “To Catch a Contractor” nor contractors were/are using that. No one is really- anymore. Nice try getting out of your absurd comment, though.
The reason every show in TV nowadays is a “reality” show is that actors ARE more expensive than random schmucks off the street.
Look, reality shows aren’t “scripted”. That doesn’t mean they’re real, just that there isn’t a writer in the back room working out what everyone is supposed to say, and they shoot actors saying those lines. They don’t script out the episode, the subjects are supposed to improv. And then storylines are cooked in the editing room.
On a scripted show they’d have a script where someone says something stupid, and someone else has a reaction. On a reality show they let people know they should be entertaining, wait for someone to say something stupid, and then edit in a totally unrelated reaction shot from someone else who might not have even been in the room.
People who are on reality shows know that if they want to get on the air they have to be entertaining. Nobody has to write lines for them or tell them about their character, they improv their lines and decide on their own characters.
Reality TV is cheap because it’s easy to find people willing to do and say outrageous things to be on TV. You don’t have to pay an actor to do and say the outrageous things you decide they should say, you outsource all that to the schmucks who want to be on the show. The proper term for a show like this is “cooked” or “worked”, not scripted.