I failed to understand the recent story of a Ham radio operator picking up the 911 calls from the WTC? Then, I heard the news got a hold of these recording NOT from the Ham guy, but from a friend in California via Internet???
What the heck? Can somebody tell me the real story, here!
How does a Ham radio get police calls? Maybe they meant a “Bear Cat Scanner”, not really a Ham?
A radio would not be able to pick up telephone calls. I heard recordings on the news of radio calls between the firemen and dispatchers, however. This type of thing is easily picked up by a radio scanner.
The CBS evening news jumped from the initial storyline to the 9-1-1 operators. It was very sloppy, I thought. I’ve noticed the news, moreso locally, likes to “slice and dice” seemingly related clips and bits together into a story. I WAG they’re trying to save time in the newsroom with the editing?
Q: How often does a Senator run for office?
A: The sap runs every year!
(Lucy Ricardo)
Here’s how you listen to FDNY (or Boston FD, Providence FD, etc) while sitting in California (or anywhere else in the world).
Just click on the department you want to hear…its that easy. On Sept 11 FDNY’s feed was down. Wonder why…
Also, some people have radio scanners with illegal modifications which allow them to hear the 900 mhz, 1.2 ghz and 2.4 ghz bands used by cordless phones. There’s a very entertaining transcript of some of these calls by a fellow named spacewurm called, I believe, ‘i hear’ (all lowercase). Of course, if the phones are digital spread-spectrum, they jump all over their particular allotted bandwidths and you can’t monitor them. But, I suppose it is possible that a ham radio guy with such an illegal scanner could have picked up a call on a cordless to 911 and recorded it.