Scanning Mobile phones

[peanut_finger]

A friend of mine use to scan mobile phones with his uniden bearcat scanner. It brought us many nights of pure entertainment. Then the phone companies switched from Analogue to digital. Is it still possible to scan digital mobile phones?

[Stretch]

Wouldn't there be some sort encyption on them now?

[Comint]

Wouldn't there be some sort encyption on them now?

Seeing there are NO scanners available that will monitor the various Digital formats used for Cellular telephones, it seems to be an irrelevant question.

However, I'm sure that most, if not all, of them, have some form of encryption. An early form of cypher used was, from memory, called A5/2, which was regularly cracked.

--
Comint

Edit: Fixed typo.

[780xlt]

There are still thousands of analogue phones used today and still sold.
On a good night in my area I can pick up around ten different locations.
These are the simple el cheapo 'Kmart' and discount store types that use a simple analogue hand piece to base signal around the 30Mhz range... They still make up around 25% of the phone market - according to latest figures I read not only a month ago... even some 'encrypted' ones can still be unscrambled... I had a couple Alinco's that did it within minutes...
I recently had a radio station do a live broadcast from my place of work (electrical retailer) - their tech guy was telling me about how secure the transmission was as it had its own internet connection - blah blah blah... but I noticed the DJ was walking around with his wireless mic - I went back to my desk and pulled out my trusty Uniden scanner and scanned the 700 range and BINGO! Clear as a bell I picked him up chating to the radio station while he was off the air.. drooling about 'How hot our cashier was'... I casualy walked over to him after he put the mic down and took off his head set.. and said 'If you like her so much ask her out..' ...he looked dumbfounded as if he had read his mind...

[Mathew]

The GSM digital network has many layers of encryption which is quite impressive.
So my answer to you would be no, not a digital network anyway. Mind you, ANY sort of phone calls (even on a dial-out trunked network) for example is illegal.


Cheers

[878ROB]

the 30mhz range will be older cordless landline phones, not mobiles, i often here 1 person in my area using 1 regulary, boring at bat shit to listen to as shes an old 1. hahahahahahahahahahahahaha

[Kevaclone]

Used to be very interesting many years ago, sitting up on Bartley's at Ascot(Brisbane) and listening to all the bored rich housewives, but then the digital cordless phones came out and only the poorer types would have those, no where near as interesting

problem was there are only 10 channels allocated for these and an area with 100 of them going at once was at times difficult

[ScannerEars]

Its going that way all the time now. The way things are going, we'll soon be left with expensive paperweights.