Book Review: Tune In On Telephone Calls

Reviewed by Lou Scannon

Tune In On Telephone Calls by Tom Kneitel, CRB Research

Telephone calls have been carried on radio waves for years - from ships at sea, from cars, and, since the advent of microwave and satellite technology, even the average long-distance call travels through the ether for a portion of its route.  And unlike the private medium of telephone wires, where a physical intrusion is required to listen in on the conversations, radio waves are everywhere around us and need only the right kind of receiver to pull them in.

Although most people know about the existence of car phones, there are a good number of other telephone services on the air: including cordless phones, local marine telephones, ships on the high seas and more.  The conversations can range from the ordinary chitchat and gossip of your neighbors, to a lonely seaman talking to his wife or children, or to your local drug dealer planning his next purchase of controlled substances.

Alas, thanks to a recent act of Congress called the "Electronic Communications Privacy Act" (ECPA for short), listening to some kinds of telephone calls over the radio is illegal.  Which kinds?  Well, it's hard to say.  If it's from a car, then it's definitely illegal to eavesdrop, if it's from a cordless telephone, then it's maybe illegal, and if it's from a boat or airplane, then it's perfectly O.K.  The law does not specify how the radio enthusiast is supposed to be able to distinguish between protected traffic and unprotected traffic.

Fortunately, the Justice Department has announced that they have no plans to enforce this portion of the ECPA which is just as well, as the thought of the Feds breaking into your house to see where you have been tuning your radio tends to put a damper on radiotelephone eavesdropping.

From the editor of Popular Communications magazine comes a book that promises to explain how you can become a radio voyeur and listen in.  And indeed it does, except by the time you come to the end of the book you're wondering what you paid for.  More than a third of the book (60 pages) is composed of channel allocation charts of questionable value.  There's no index or bibliography, the latter which would have been useful as the reader is referred to other books whenever the author declines to delve too deep into the technicalities.  All in all, a steep price for a few frequency charts and a lot of folksy diatribe against the ECPA.

Kneitel may have gotten too used to writing monthly magazine editorials and seems unable to talk about cellular phones without sniping at the industry lobbyists and members of Congress who sponsored the ECPA.  Although the ECPA is without a doubt bad legislation that fails to understand the technology it purports to regulate, Kneitel spends far too much space in an already sparse tome whining about it.

For the complete novice, there's a short chapter on what kind of equipment you'll need (a scanner that covers the 870-896 MHz cellular band and a general coverage shortwave receiver), and a few tips on antennas.  Kneitel has a few good words for the RadioShack PRO-2004 scanner, which after a quick modification (also described in the book) becomes an efficient machine for following cellular calls.

The book covers each portion of the radio spectrum that contains something to do with telephone calls.  Car phones, cordless phones, wilderness and remote area phones, radio common carriers, beepers, local marine, regional marine, high seas marine, and oil rigs.

Satellite and microwave links are briefly touched upon, but the equipment needed for intercepting microwave links isn't described.  A little miscellany that might not be easily found elsewhere is also included, such as telephone company maintenance frequencies, experimental air and railroad phone services, and the MARS military network used for patching phone calls for uniformed personnel on ships or at U.S. bases overseas.

Although the book is informative, it is a skinny volume at a fat price.  With a little trimming, it would have made a good article in Popular Communications, and would only have cost $2.50 at the newsstand.  For more complete information on channel allocations, RadioShack sells the Police Call Radio Guide, which contains complete scanner frequency listings for a particular area.  This will tell you just about everything, though it's in a hard to digest format and you'll have to dig for what you want.

For station listings in the shortwave band, which will include a worldwide rundown of the maritime telephone frequencies and military MARS frequencies (but again they'll be buried among a lot of other frequency listings), see the "Confidential Frequency List," from GILFER Shortwave (800-GIL-FER-1 or 201-391-7887, Box 239, 52 Park Avenue, Park Ridge, NJ 07656.