Picking up chat on my car radio!

r3nu4l

May not be the right place for this...

Today while I was waiting on mrs r3nu4l to finish up at work I was re-tuning the car radio. At 87.5 FM the dial stopped tuning and I could hear three guys chatting, all on two ways and obviously working for the same company.

The chat was fairly normal, one guy wanted to know if he was alowed to drive into Brampton on the A1 or if it was weight limited, the other guys didn't know so he said he would play dumb if he was stopped by the cops. They then discussed the fact that farmers with tractors are allowed to drive in and never get stopped but trucks always seemed to... and so on.

My question is how does my car radio pick up these signals? Why haven't I heard these types of conversations before. I regularly re-tune looking for local stations and trafic news but have never heard this type of stuff before. I vaguely remember eyars ago in Dublin, hearing taxi drivers at about 88FM too. What gives?

RoundyMooney

Japanese car radios are particularly susceptible to this (as the FM band there is 75-90MHz or something along those lines, as opposed to everybody else's 88-108 MHz).

As you might have gathered, you're picking up taximen or couriers, which use frequencies in the range (roughly) of 68 up to 86 MHz or so.

Rest assured your stereo is working fine, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the boyos were slightly out of band, if they were using older gear...

r3nu4l

Thanks RoundyM. Well my car is Italian as is the radio. They may have been couriers but if they were, it was a large van they were using because they were talking about weight restrictions on some of the roads. They were also talking about a friend caught with red diesel in his tank

I wonder how far the signal travels, didn't try listening this morning, I played some music instead

PauloMN

I definitely remember being able to hear Bord Gais down there years ago, but I thought all that low VHF gear was long gone, being replaced with UHF stuff.

Must get the scanner out and have a listen, see what's down there these days!

As far as range goes - maybe 5 to 10 miles or so, maybe slightly more if it was a repeater you were hearing (if so you'd probably hear little beeps between people speaking). No doubt it would have been pretty local to you, unless you were experiencing "lift" conditions where longer distances are possible (unlikely though with the recent crap weather).

r3nu4l

Yeah, they were talking about Brampton, near Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire so we're talking roughly 30 miles from where I was sitting.
Weather was pretty poor, I didn't hear any beeps between chat. They also weren't using any call signs, I got the impression that they were full sure no-one could hear them, maybe they just get used to it and forget.

PauloMN

Those guys would have no clue that they can be heard on a normal car radio, that's the thing!

It's like cheap cordless phones (the larger, older non-DECT ones) - people converse on them just like they are a wired phone, oblivious to the fact that their radio-savvy neighbours could be listening to their private conversations. In fact, with a decent scanner and a good receiving antenna, those things can be heard over a fair distance.

Hearing people through baby monitors is another example. At the end of the day, all those devices are just analogue audio transmitters.

Heathen

When i lived in Dublin their was a Taxi company local to me operating on 87ish MHz and i used to be able to pick them up..

now i have a jap car and the taxi company up the road comes through cos i have Freq changer in the car for Irish FM band..
you cant hear them crystal, probably due to the car radio recieving on WFM and then transmitting on NFM... maybe? or maybe im talking sh1te