FD goes digital & scrambled

[News Active]

I am a freelancer television ptohographer and mostly do news, news magazine type shows and documentaries. However, I have also done alot of spot news during past years. Except for last four weeks.

The problem is, the fire department (and police) started to use this new digital TETRA-network last month. The FD has arranged loud speakers via cable to most of the news rooms but nothing else.

Last year, when the FD was planning this change to digital, they told that it could be possible for journalists to receive alerts via SMS text messages or even better, the FD could program TETRA receivers for their network and journalists could buy them.

But now when the change is made, they decided not to build either of them. Only the loud speaker system. Other cities and counties in this country decided to offer this text message system to journalists but not my area, which is the capital city. Too expensive, they say.

So, any advice? Anything I could do? It's not a big part of my income, not at all. It just used to be a nice extre money and extra adrenaline..

 

[focusthis]

Try here. Just a quick Google search for "Finland TETRA scanner".

 

[jbar]

Maybe a Radio Shack Pro-96 digital scanner would help. Check out radioshack.com

 

[Natural Born Stringer]

Bad news all around... and no a PRO-96 won't help you. Pro 96's only understand APCO25 digital. TETRA is a totally different animal.

What you can do depends...

1. Do you have private ambulance companies that operate on analog business frequencies? If so, find out what they are and monitor them - that should help you figure out who's going where and to what.

2. Do your FD guys use alpha pagers to retransmit CAD messages? If so, I recommend this site: http://www.xs4all.nl/~atron/flex/pdw_eng.html This program, coupled with a properly modified scanner, can yield some AMAZING things. I will leave it at that, as us US residents are not legally allowed to partake in such monitoring.

I do know that there is currently no scanner on the market that can monitor TETRA radio. And encryption is part of the standard, so even if someone wanted to devote the money towards developing such a radio, it would be useless without a decryption key, which only the FD would be able to provide.

Sorry for the bad news.