Mobile Phone Tracking

[Heisenberg]

I saw some software recently that if you enter any mobile number in the UK it would give you the longitude and latitude of the mobiles location. It worked with any phone PAYG or Contract smart or non smart phone. has any one else seen this?

Using this studios and other things could be found in an instant.

[Albert H]

"The Law" have been able to do this for years. Don't worry too much about it - they need a Warrant, and those are difficult to come by.

Back in the 80s, we used to use a device called a "call diverter", which coupled two phone lines together - it would receive the call on one line, and while it was ringing, would dial out on the other line to the final destination. The caller would just hear three normal-sounding bursts of ring tone, then the guy in the studio saying "Good evening, thanks for calling Radio Blah".

The caller would be completely unaware of the re-routing. We used the device with a time switch, so we could install it (in one case) in a shop that sold clerical clothes to vicars, and it only worked when the shop was closed. You can imagine the confusion when Eric Gotts found out what was at the address attached to the phone number we were giving out on air!

We also used a further bit of telephonic wizardry, with the receiving end of the phone re-route being in the next street to the studio. I installed a scrambled UHF cordless telephone to get the calls to the studio - if Eric had found the call diverter and found out the number it was re-routing to, he would then have found a cordless phone base, and would be not very much closer to finding our studio!

Access to the green box at the street corner also gave opportunities to use "service pairs" - unallocated, test phone lines - to provide anonymous telephone service, and the option to wire such circuits up from distribution frame to distribution frame and box to box in such a convoluted manner that they would be very difficult to trace.

In those days it was also possible to make calls free to your listeners, by using a "high loop resistance" circuit that prevented the billing pulse being passed through the receiving phone - callers were always surprised when they called from a payphone, and they got no "pips" to put money in!

We also ran a phone line from building to building on a West London estate, so that the receiving line was actually in a completely different building from the registered address. The wire ran across a road about six floors up!

We had great fun in those days. There were even modified phone boxes all over West London, with a small, concealed jack socket fitted that allowed free calls to people with the right little device to plug in to the socket!

There were quite a few of the old cash box and wall phone payphone systems that were modified so that when the "pips" sounded, you held in the button on the phone marked "press" (the old "Party Line" switch) and dialled the number of 10p coins you wanted it to register. This was a common modification in Student's Union buildings and bars, and we didn't tell everyone about the hack, so the phone still took a reasonable amount of money!

[thewisepranker]

It is very easy to triangulate a mobile phone however you need access to the network in order to do it, which would probably require, as Albert says, a warrant. The transmission sites are of deliberately low power to enable triangulation, however the reason that they are of deliberately low power is to maximise the bandwidth efficiency, rather than to enable easy triangulation. The ease of triangulation is merely a side-effect of the way that the network works.

Search for "OFDMA" or "CDMA". The "MA" part is the clue - it stands for Multiple Access, and is the driver for deliberately low power cell sites. It works very well, as you have probably experienced visiting this very forum on your mobile "phone"!

The critical thing about the multiple access bit is that no single request is ever handled in its entirety (unless it is trivially small, say less than one byte) on one channel in any one band. Doing this, which is essentially frequency hopping, improves bandwidth efficiency despite appearing to to be less efficient from a "top level" perspective. It is to this end that the cell sites are of deliberately low power, as there are many transmitters within a relatively small area on the same channels within the same bands - quite unlike FM radio or indeed lots of other services such as terrestrial TV and DAB.

There are slightly simpler methods you should be concerned about - texting a "studio selfie" to someone can reveal the location of your studio as the GPS co-ordinates are quite likely to be embedded in the EXIF data. Facebook and other social networks strip this data, but MMS messages do not.

[Heisenberg]

I wasn't thinking so much about the authorities using this, if thieves had access to it it would be easy to locate a studio.

Hopefully this never happens but the software is out there for sale hopefully it doesn't fall into the wrong hands

[Maximus]

I think some studios used to have Nokia 3310s with modified firmware which would let them connect to only one cell site at a time and make it difficult for whoever to triangulate the signal?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[nrgkits.nz]

These days you could just use a VoIP line over an encrypted VPN

[Albert H]

These days you could just use a VoIP line over an encrypted VPN

Correct. Also many of the call diversion tricks we used to use can still be applied with a bit of intelligence.

[g2000]

We keep mobile phone at the TX site, then run some software on the handset that forwards the SMS to a web server for djs to view - a bit like the call router trick, but we only do SMS