Party Vibe

the Russian/German Telegram service looks interesting; although there are a few blogs pointing out flaws in the crypto and TBH I wouldn’t trust any of it for privacy any more than I would an analogue CB radio.

you can in fact still buy CB radios today – although they need inconveniently large antennas by todays standards to get any decent range and there is too much interference in many urban areas from other electronic equipment although they are still popular in some areas (one of them is quite near Tryptameanie; I think it is in the areas there are hills/mountains or near the coast).

@tryptameanie 977715 wrote:

My god it’s been a long time since I heard anyone mention CB radio. Have never used one myself but remember as a kid 2 of my mates dads used them and they both had a massive antenna bolted to their houses.

Yep you need about 3-6 metres antenna element and 10m mast (and then to put up with suspicious neighbours claiming you are cutting across the telly / sending signals to foreign spies, when nowadays it is the cheap plasma tellys and power line networking cutting across the HF radio frequencies).

TBH the youngest folk who can remember these are around my age and many of the enthusiasts are our Dads sort of age;
it may well be the same chaps whose forum posts I was reading last night. Since 2014 Ofcom (and all CEPT Communications Miinistries) allow you to use the single sideband transmission which goes much further and you can talk to people across Europe when the conditions are good; although I’ve tried monitoring the frequencies on my shortwave receiver at home and just hear “ssssssssss” or other random noises….

this is a very basic guide; which is biased more towards broadcasting although does to be fair explain the first principles.

AM is increasingly rarely used for broadcasting; the FM radio we listen to for music has much wider frequency deviation than FM used for communications purposes (so it has better audio quality)

Digital broadcasting, GSM mobile phones and mobile data are based on FM transmissions of digitally encoded data (which is why its harder for younger people to get their heads round radio communicatiion as its harder to envisage out how the signal gets to the other end)

Radio and digital radio | How it works | AM and FM compared

TBH best way to understand wireless communications is to start monitoring them – if you have a reasonably modern laptop (from 2010 onwards) running Windows 7 and are able to use it in an upstairs room and maybe point a small antenna out of a window you don’t need to spend a great deal to be able to monitor all of VHF and much of the UHF bands – its perfectly legal provided you don’t blatantly breach others privacy (monitoring stuff like aircraft and shipping comms is actually encouraged nowadays by Ofcom)

https://www.partyvibe.org/forums/computers-gadgets-and-technology/107800-cheap-radio-monitoring-equipment-part.html