sorry about your shiny new publc safety radio infrastructure...

[Tom Azlin N4ZPT]

Hi Bob S.

Seems to me that the core argument of the article is nuts two ways. 
Suggesting that all public safety radios switch to spread spectrum is 
nuts. Talk about cost! Just after forcing communities to pay twice once 
for phase I P25 and now for phase II P25? And the second way is that the 
users are stupid if they discuss sensitive stuff on an unencrypted radio 
or any interceptable link for that matter. The military has been taking 
advantage of that stupidity since the Civil war when telegraph was being 
used and abused. Make sure users know to use encryption when they have 
it and use call phones or land lines when they do not. And make sure 
that the FCC knows it is expected to support geolocation of interfering 
signals. And make sure the operators know how to spot this.

I also thought that the P25 IMBE voice stream re-synced on quite short 
intervals. Have to go check. (Later this year or early next year the 
NVFMA will have a dual mode FM/P25 repeater up replacing the broken 
447.025 exciter in addition to running FM repeaters and D-STAR repeaters.)

Then one could also talk about opinion/fact that the whole forced 
transition to digital voice from FM repeater/trunked radio systems and 
the forced narrow banding is pretty short sighted in the first place. 
Almost as if the manufactures simply had saturated their market so had 
to come up with a new idea.

Does point out how our FM radios and repeaters are perfectly fine and 
quite robust in fact in some ways more robust than the radios being used 
by our pubic service/safety brethren. And even we can be jammed quite 
easily. Happens all the time around the country. Sometimes we never 
catch the deliberate jammers.

73, tom n4zpt

On 8/10/2011 10:18 AM, Robert Stratton wrote:
> Matt Blaze is presenting at Usenix Security today on how a $30 toy jams P25 radios.
>
> http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20090434-281/security-flaw-found-in-feds-digital-radios/
>