deloptes <delop...@gmail.com> writes: > I just wonder why one would do that, but it is again your business.
In all but a very small handful of countries around the world, the hobby of amateur radio exists and it's justification for existence is to allow people to self-train as to how electronic communication, especially radio, works. The vast majority of radio amateurs do not do destructive things with the knowledge they gain but listening to non-amateur communications systems and understanding how they work is part of the hobby. So, we do things that may seem really strange to those who don't look at technology that way. Computers fit right in to this hobby also as they are part of modern life. > Nowdays > all of this communication is encrypted and you have virtually no chance > listening to this. When the day comes in which all radio communications are encrypted except for amateur radio where encryption is illegal, we will probably stop listening to signals other than amateur radio and broadcasting. Right now, much is still in the clear. It may be digitally encoded but the coding standards are either to improve reception, compress bandwidth or both. If they are to obscure the conversation from eaves-droppers, then the landscape gets more complicated regarding the law. > In most of the countries it is even illegal, but ok, > one > can do things for fun anyway - braking the encryption though is close to > impossible. That is quite true. some of the encoding schemes involve more than one layer of encryption and use 1024-bit keys or something similar so a person who doesn't know the key or keys involved probably doesn't have enough seconds in his or her natural life to break even 1 set of keys much less deal with the key-holders changing the keys every hour or so. There are far better ways to spend one's life. > The communication follows well defined protocol, so knowing it, you might > be > able to read the frames, but the content will remain hidden. Quite true. In the case of what I am doing, a web site for scanner radio enthusiasts published the frequencies and the logical order in which they should be entered in to a receiver but the index numbers turned out to be wrong due to changes made to the site after the information was published. The control data includes the index number for the channel to which a conversation or part of one is assigned so one can learn the list by reading the index numbers and observing which channels come to life. This allows one to fix the list correctly. It's like solving a partly assembled puzzle. Sorry for getting far afield of the original topic. Martin WB5AGZ