Legalities About Intercepting Mobile Phones

[Avtur50_exVet]

I am not new to scanning, I have a bearcat 3000 bought on ebay for a song, came from QLD. A Yaesu 9600, I had a Realistic pro20 but someone needed it more than I did , Well I now have the Icom IC-R20
This has a lot of bells and whistles not as simple to drive as the the previous two. Question is what if i intercept something on a Mobile Phone?
Any advice appreciated and thanks to you for sending me the regn
Pat

[WPXZBP]

You are NOT permitted to receive any telecommunications - fixed line or mobile phone. Not even those with a portable handset.

As I understand it you won't be able to pick up anything from the GSM network as they have use encryption.

[Pty]

PLUS mobile phones use digital transmissions and your scanners only receive analogue signals.

Many years ago before they introduced digital mobile phones (you may remember the hoo-ha back in 97-98) any off the shelf scanner capable of 800mhz could receive mobile phones. Trust me, i know

[AustDave]

Ok guys and girls here is the low down.

Any communication that either enters or leaves the PTSN system is illegal to listen to. This includes any transmission from radio network that has a patch to the telephone system.

CDMA can be monitored as it is still an analog system, how ever read the above about the legalities of it. Recently heard tho that our old faithful telco (no names mentioned, but thier logo is the T will be shutting down CDMA in the next few years and no it wont be replaced. CDMA was a stop gap messure to allow improvements on the GSM network coverage wise

[Bonez]

Ok guys and girls here is the low down.

Sorry to spoil your fun dave, but you are horribly wrong on a couple of points there.

CDMA stands for 'code division multiple access' and it's a fully digital system. No, you can't listen to it on a scanner

Telstra announced a while back that CDMA will be slowly phased out and replaced with an Australia wide 3rd generation mobile system (3G), providing streaming video, audio and broadband-type data speeds to customers Australia wide. This is one good thing that will finally bring reasonably priced broadband to the bush.

The only form of 'phones' that you can recieve on a scanner is an analog cordless, which is around 30mhz FM. It's not legal to listen to those, as you have stated.

I'm not 100% sure about the monitoring of a PSTN call patched into a normal radio system (eg, Seaphone etc) however there doesn't appear to be a massive amount of that in use anyhow.

[vk6hgr]

I'm not 100% sure about the monitoring of a PSTN call patched into a normal radio system (eg, Seaphone etc) however there doesn't appear to be a massive amount of that in use anyhow.

MPT trunking systems usually have phone patches and they're used fairly often.

[Rusty_Nail]

I thought the mopbile phone frequencies were blocked out on most scanners anyways..

[vk6hgr]

I thought the mopbile phone frequencies were blocked out on most scanners anyways..

They just block the frequencies used by the old-style analogue (AMPS) mobiles which we haven't used here in Australia for over 6 years now but they still use it a lot in the US and 3rd world countries.