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Cordless And Cellular Phones - Easy Targets For Scanners?

If this question were being asked about 10 or 15 years ago the answer would have to be yes. In those days it was child's play to set up a scanner to monitor cell phone and cordless phones. All you needed was the proper scanner and a little bit of info on where to look!

In those days all of the cell phone conversations were transmitted in plain-old FM mode and were very easily overheard. Cordless phones, which have been in wide use for many years, were assigned to the low VHF band and operated in the 46 and 49 MHz areas with FM signals as well.

With a good external antenna you could monitor cellular phone conversations from many different cell phone transmitter towers. I can recall tuning through the 800 MHz band, where cellular phones operated back in those days, and hearing 50 or more separate conversations. Personally, I never found that kind of listening all that fascinating and did not spend a whole lot of time on it. There were a lot of business people on and most of the conversations were quite uninteresting to me.

The story was similar for cordless telephones. Again, with a good external antenna mounted in a high location, it was possible to hear cordless phone transmissions up to a mile away and sometimes even more!

Fortunately for the privacy of their users, both cellular telephones and cordless phones are much more difficult to monitor these days. You can no longer just buy a scanner off the shelf and expect to hear all kinds of private conversations.

Most, if not all, cellular transmissions are now in digital mode and have moved up the frequency range beyond the old 800 MHz band in most areas. It would probably take a very dedicated effort and some expensive equipment to successfully monitor cellular telephone conversations now.

Cordless phones have also moved up in frequency range and the only phones you will hear on the low VHF band are phones that were made years ago and are still working today. Cordless phones were moved up the 900 MHz band a few years ago and now most of them being manufactured are higher still -- up in the 2 GHz and 5 GHz frequency ranges and are much more difficult to monitor.

Just for fun, I have tried monitoring my own 900 MHz cordless telephone and was not able to get a good enough signal from it to monitor. I honestly don't know if that is due to the mode of transmission they are using now or some other technology that is being used with the newer phones to make them more difficult to eavesdrop on.

I used to warn my friends about the cell and cordless phone conversations back when they were easily monitored by scanner listeners, but that is no longer necessary. I suspect that only a very few people have the capability to monitor those things now, and they are probably in it for very specific and possibly very questionable reasons in order to justify expending so much expense and effort in order to overhear private conversations.

If you were expecting to purchase a scanner radio and be able to monitor all kinds of juicy cell phone and cordless telephone conversations, you are likely to be very disappointed when you discover that you missed that opportunity by a decade or so.