grewar wrote: ↑Sun Nov 01, 2020 6:29 pm
Just reflecting on changes in scanning. I had an sds100 almost total silence except for the fire and ambos. Nothing left to scan, even the taxis are digital encrypted......except ambos. I get full ambo signal for most of the western side of Vic and the tower here is only a couple of hundred metres away. All this on my little old analogue scanner
To an extent your situation is geographical. In a good number of regional areas, irrespective of the state, there is little to monitor. The 000 has either entirely or partially gone 'green' leaving a few local business. Those businesses rarely (I am speaking generally) adopt privacy on their assignments. Alas your local taxi is one that did.
While it is true that LTE has been taken up by a number of users, me included. It provides a relatively cheap, secure and wide area alternative. It is not however the panacea for all things communications. It has its failings and some users who were eager to take it up found that it did not meet their needs and returned to conventional radio. This is first hand knowledge from when I worked for a two way radio company.
Sadly scanning has had a more significant influence on agencies encrypting than some might realise. Radio Reference and its alter ego Broadcastify has directly caused a number of law enforcement departments to encrypt. Officer safety being cited as the main reason. Pages like this and those on Facebook etc are routinely scanned (pardon the pun) by those departments, agencies and organisations being reported in those very pages. To think otherwise is naive in the extreme. The somewhat limp excuse that most of the frequency information is in the public forum (ACMA database) is, while true, not justification for publishing additional information, widespread. Again personal experience tells me that agencies will risk assess the data being made public and decide whether privacy of communications is warranted. You can pretty well guarantee it will be.
Unfortunately common sense seems to have departed the hobby, replaced with an arrogance and bravado that the perceived anonymity on the internet brings. We only have ourselves to blame!
R
