Hi all, I'm a newbie here but have been reading some of the posts with interest, especially some of those concerning digital radio and encryption. I can, having used the old police radio network understand the people who say that it is a better network, in the bad old days it always seemed you got a dead spot right when it was the last thing you wanted, however, you have to wonder about the security aspects of encryption, when the tetra radios first came out, it was said they would be only available to the emergency services, now you can get them, albeit wiped, secondhand on e-bay, surely it won't be too long before someone works out how to get them to pick up the police frequencies once again.
Back in the day, when it was all analogue, I remember you could get the police channels at the top end of any decent FM radio, then they moved them, then along came the scanner and people could listen in once more.I had a mate back then who worked for the home office, his job was fitting radio's in police cars, Nearly everybody who worked there had an old radio with a set of crystals in so they could listen at home, and the beauty of working there was you knew exactly what frequency was used in which force area, and which department used what, so unlike with a scanner, where quite often you could only hear either the base or the mobile, with the proper kit you could hear it all.
I remember at the time the organisation I worked for handled security for local government buildings, if a call came in, both ourselves and the police would be dispatched, thereby ensuring a very fast response time, by either us or them, it didn't matter who got there first as long as someone did. One day the unthinkable happened, one of our team lost a walkie-talkie, someone found it and after a week or two of playing silly beggars, they, or someone they knew, settled down to working out exactly how our system worked, unfortunately, there was no way to block the unit without affecting all the others, we just had to hope they'd either get bored or something would happen to the radio,it didn't. we had to maintain a strict radio procedure back then, each building had a call-sign, and so did each patrol, they worked part of this out and we had a couple of break-ins as a result. We changed the call-signs and got everything back to normal, we even had some cheeky sod offering us the radio back for a "finders fee" when they realised it was of no further use.
One thing I have noticed in the last few years is the standard of RT procedure seems to have fallen badly, things are often mentioned over the air that wouldn't have been back in my day, A couple of years ago I was helping a mate out with a problem at a nightclub, it was decided the only solution was to bring in a dog handler, now having done this in the past, and still having a working dog, I was the first person he approached to help him. The job went well for the first week, trouble was reduced massively, obviously to the thugs who had been causing bother, tackling a bouncer was one thing, tackling a handler with a large German Shepherd was an entirely different matter, then one night it all kicked off.
It wasn't as spectacular as you may have thought, no gang of thugs armed with baseball bats, rather just one drugged up nutter with a bicycle! When it was all over I had to go to the police station to do the paperwork and the front desk was in typical Friday night mode, in short, chaotic. Knowing on or two of the cops on the night shift I was invited into the back, "we'll grab a coffee while we do the paperwork" said one of the lads who'd attended the job.We went in the back and sat at a table in a small "brew room", there were several other cops in there and on one of the tables was a radio, it was set to group mode and you could hear everything that was happening, a couple of domestics, a car smash, drunks fighting,you name it, it was going on.
What struck me most about it was I was able to completely understand every word, gone were the IC codes, instead it was "a white male approx 5'8" tall, most of the callsigns had disappeared as had most of the RT procedure I knew from way back. no matter how much they encrypt transmission unless they go back to using the correct "radio language" then it will only be a matter of time before the encryption becomes an expensive white elephant, after all, what is the point in asking an officer at an incident if his radio is secure, while they pass on some important piece of information, often the informants details, if there are several other officers nearby also on that channel whose radios are on open speaker.