Don't Try This At Home?

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[jerrycoffey]

This sounds like the audio I heard, while aboard ship in the USN 40 years ago. I was told at the time it was encrypted audio that we did not have the key to decrypt. It was a radio transmission from a aircraft.

[EOGIY]

That dummy load antenna has a considerable radiator element. I suggest adding a reflector and a few directors to it.

[victorcharlie]

To scramble or not to scramble, that's exactly how people sound to me anyway, when I'm tuning them out, tnx Man!

[tonyd]

Could be useful when the space aliens come to take over the earth.

[bulldogbrower]

Before the American police departments switched to P-25 encrypted digital, they would use this scrambling technique with a black box attached to their FM transceivers. They would be given a code instruction to dial in by dispatch, and then talk about a secret message. Sometimes it was about a homicide, or when a drug raid was to begin. After the event they would switch back to regular transmissions. This was when the police trusted the public and appreciated the help of the listening public to call in and help when they were looking for a particular person or car. Nowadays they digitally scramble every call. What happened to their trust ?

[WIRT]

Simple audio inversion, which is essentially lower sideband audio. A fixed audio tone in the 1000 to 2000 Hz range is mixed with the audio and the difference is used, then the tone re-injected on the RX side. This is voice privacy at the lowest level. About 30 years ago, while still in the analog domain, companies like Midian and others came out with rolling code inversion that was virtually impossible to decode, which changed the injection tone hundreds or thousands of times a second, with everything synched on the keydown. The only problem was you couldn't come in mid-transmission. DVP, then DES, then AES came after. Best ENC is military-only frequency hopping.

As for using it, if you are deliberately trying to obscure a message's meaning then it runs afoul of Part 97. I recall one P25 repeater owner published his AES key on the repeater's website or anybody to try it out as an experiment. There was also a voice message transmitted at ID intervals instructing the curious where to find the ENC key for it.

[LBQJ]

yeah it is true that we have a license to experiment with, but in many people's eye this can be interpreted as encryption and therefore in the radioamateur world it is legal for us to use.

[WIRT]

One of my favourite inversion-scrambling stories came out of Toronto in the mid-90s. There were two traffic reporters in Cessna 172s who would fly around the city during rush hours. The news desk used Motorola Virtual Privacy Adapters for breaking stories to reporters, and the airplanes had it as well. One of the two retired pilots was a serious radio gearhead and one day, killing time live on air (this was a 50kW directional AMer on 680 kHz) he was giving his report and said something along the lines of "I wonder if I can fly upside down to see the traffic better. Here we go, turning, steeper, steeper, almost there [flips on the scrambler] I'm upside down now (or probably words to that affect, then back to clear). The studio announcer was utterly dumbfounded and the back channel chatter on 150 MHz was....interesting afterwards. I had a similar box on my commercial radio that I used with some news junkies on a legal business band simplex channel and we'd listen in on them and got all the news scoops until they wised up and went to rolling code.

[DonzLockz]

Thanks Steve, no one has shown scramble mode before... that I've seen anyway.
My uhf cb has them. I bought a uniden set in 2010 but never used scramble but probably should have. ;)

[donnakano]

Scrambling is illegal on amateur radio, GMRS, FRS, MURS. Encryption is also illegal. Scramble is generally pretty easy to decrypt. Encryption is harder, but still easy enough with enough computing power. As you said, once you transmit, it will be easy to identify and track. Why not use DMR or another digital mode on ham radio, which is legal and much harder to decrypt with an FM radio?

[Crushbandicoot-wvxb]

So if you have a couple of these radios set to the same scramble mode you can talk to each other?

[davep]

I wanted to what the scrabbled audio sounded after being "decoded" Not just when the scrabble was turned off.
On another topic. Who makes a radio with PTT-ID decode ? Many have PTT-ID encode ?

[WKJD]

I have two radios that have scramble mode, I really don’t understand any reason why, I want to be heard and clearly understood when I transmit.

[WLDT]

Im looking in Part 97. It clearing prohibits scrambling your signal. I think.

[wirelessx]

🤣 Not illegal in AU ..voice inversion is a standard in UHF CB radio's Uniden & Icom, RTTY does a decent job deciphering inversion. What is Illegal is real encryption !

[redrockengineer]

Does this radio transmit outside the amateu....um, normal...um,

Have the transmit frequencies been hacked?

[hoopztube]

This is just inversion scrambling. Fairly easy to decode off you need to. It's not illegal on Amateur radio and as you said, it's definitely not any form of encryption.

[telepolo]

You didn’t explain how the receiving radio descrambles the audio —— you didn’t do a demonstration of that

[GaryStango]

so if it does turn out to be JUST audio shifting... it would be TECHNICALLY fcc compliant for HAMs to use?

[barrybogart]

Years ago I got a pair of UHF handies that used frequency-hopping spread spectrum. Not on a ham band and no license required. Does anyone know if they are legal? Not encrypted but pretty hard to make sense of. except with a very agile receiver like the FCC and CIA probably have.