Party Vibe

reposted from .com (BTW this is also a demo of Kali Linux controlling an RTL-USB radio receiver dongle)

We didn’t have GSM mobiles until mid/late 1990s’ mobile phones were analogue, way expensive to own and had the great disadvantage that anyone nearby with a radio scanner could listen in to your phone calls.

Using one in a pirate radio studio was also dodgy as it could give away the location of the studio (mobile networks have always logged the device location; the system would not work otherwise), any audio recording would have the studio music in the background and it could pick up interference from the “band I transmitter”. This is a lower power transmitter operating on the old VHF TV frequencies which (unused in the UK for TV since 1985) which sent the studio audio to a receiver and the main “Band II (FM radio)” transmitter which was usually about 0,5 km away on a tower block or other high structure.

So instead we used these pagers – although it was a national network (still used today) on VHF frequencies rather than the small scale UHF system in the video below

The receiver would have been slightly bigger and unlikely to have a white LED; those may not have been invented then! – and it is not easy to get second hand UHF pagers from the 1990s (I suspect the Germans and Dutch have hoarded the lot ). Of course decoding the message in real time on a computer wasn’t that easy in 1990 (you would have something like a service monitor which costs about €10 000) but the music is from the correct era 🙂

To send a message you had to make a telephone call to some call centre in London’ (often on a premium rate number) and give the correct capcode (the pager ID number) and the message to the operator; who would type it in on a computer terminal for transmission to the pager network.

As the pagers operated on around 150 MHz and the Band I link was on around 50 MHz the pirates had to be careful that thie signal was not excessively strong or the antenna wrongly connected or third harmonic interference would garble the pager message….