Motorola MDT terminals

[rpierce]

I had a question about MDT terminals. Here in our county the Sheriff's department is on an 800Mhz trunked system, we made (cloned) a codeplug of their deputies radio, modified it so we couldnt transmit and programmed it into some MTX8000's so we could monitor them cheaply without a trunking scanner, now my question is would it be possible to program a Motorola MDT terminal to intercept their dispatch calls to the vehicles and possibly type PM messages to other MDT's via our repeated 400Mhz radio system?

[/\/\y 2 cents]

your playing with fire...if you are experimenting with these types of projects....try to keep them to yourself, also, if you get caught typing PM over their MDT network, you are just as guilty as keying up on their radio system...probably even worse. I have a friend that got caught with an Astro Saber III, MTX8000 B7 and a STX 821....All had been Lab'd and capiable of TX'ing on State of Florida ASTRO System, Broward County Smartnet, Broward County School board, Statewide mutual Aide, plus others, he was private calling people and didn't know that one of the system administrators were smarter than he thought. They were using Systemwatch sotware, and enabled RadioTrace, and when he was in the courtroom, they showed the judge how much he had been using the system, right down to how many MDC pages he had sent to his other buddy...Now he is facing major jailtime, and to add insult to injury, Motorola caught wind of this and he is now facing not only a criminal charge, but a civil lawsuit filied on behalf of motorola. be smart about this stuff, and if you have it, dont bring it out of the house!

[rpierce]

what we did was take a county codeplug and remove the means to transmit from it so we could only recieve and monitor, then we put our conventional 800Mhz repeated freq on channel 16 that was the only one we could transmit on. then we could switch the ABC switch to C and it would scan all the county channels or leave it on A and set it to any one of their channels, there was NO WAY to xmit on their channels, only monitor. I realized I mistyped what I wanted to accomplish with the MDT. I want to program them to RECIEVE ONLY their transmissions with no way to PM on their network but have it programmed so we could PM our other MDT's on our own repeated freq which is a non trunked 400Mhz system. We dont have the MTX8000's anymore for our radio system since Nextel bought all the 800Mhz commercial radio services in the area, we had to sell most of our equipment and buy UHF radios (GE MPA portables,Spectra and Maratrac mobiles). We ended up selling some of the MTX8000's to our employees as county SO scanners.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: rpierce on 2001-11-23 15:20 ]</font>

[/\/\y 2 cents]

do you have any MTX8000's left over? i need one, but only if they have a display on them (B5 or B7 versions) Yeah I wasnt sure if maybe you had mis-typed your message about PM'ing on your county mdt system...didn't seem like too smart of an idea....you can get software for your computer that will let you decode the MDT messaging...you need to get a radio exclusively to monitor the Data Frequency...like a spectra or MCS2000....or even a scanner..and then you interface it somehow(i know it is possible, i saw someone who had it) to the computer and run the software, it will then decode the data on your screen...you should see alot of the stuff that comes across it...lots of sensitive radio traffic is sent across it rather than using voice due to the fact that they know that criminals monitor too...and if they want to sneak up on them...they need to dispatch the call silently. For instance a bank robbery or home robbery. Lots of times you dont hear them talking about the call until after they arrive because of the fear that if they dispatch it over the radio the culprits have a 5 to 10 minute head start to leave before the cops get there. Let me know on that MTX8000..i could use one