Author Topic: I'm a noob with a VX-7R.. advice please?  (Read 5213 times)

Offline Akilldema

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I'm a noob with a VX-7R.. advice please?
« on: November 04, 2010, 05:37:46 AM »
The taco bell takeover was hilarious and inspired me to harass some local restaurants for my own lulz. A friend of mine snagged one of these new and we got it freebanded. Neither of us has ever owned a ham radio or any other kind for that matter, so I just had a few basic questions. What other equipment do I need to successfully locate fast food frequencies? I googled and found several lists, but they seem to vary greatly from area to area. I bought a Radio Shack "race scanner" after I saw some posts on here suggesting they were good, but it never picked up any drive thrus. To transmit and receive on a drive thru headset, do multiple frequencies need to be used simultaneously on the hand held? Thanks for any help.. I know you guys get a lot of people posting about this, but hey at least I bought the right radio instead of a CB radio and some mythical toaster crystal.

Offline RFBURN26

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Re: I'm a noob with a VX-7R.. advice please?
« Reply #1 on: November 04, 2010, 11:49:38 AM »
Radio shack NASCAR scanners are worthless. Unless you're an inbred redneck that's into that sort of thing. You're going to have to do a little research into the business's you are looking to harass.  Online guides like cityfreq.com and radioreference.com will point you in the right direction but for starters, drive through and take a look at the actual headsets you are tying to exploit. If they look like the one's I linked in my Messing with Mall Cops post you are shit out of luck. A lot of the bigger chains have gone digital.

With just a VX-7 you are going to have to do things the old fashion way, they are most likely using the 70cm band for point to point communications (if they have not gone digital), which is 450mhz-470mhz. So plug 450 into your VX and start rolling through the freqs with a 10khz step. It may take awhile but it works. Do it in the restaurants parking lot, while there are customers, so you know when its active. Most have a tone that alerts the workers when a car pulls up. That's the dead give away you have the right freq.

Now you can probably pull this off right from the parking lot, but if you cant seem to break into the conversation you are going to need some more power. Know anything about building field expedient antenna's? Well you should,  dxzone.com has some well made guides on building just about anything you need.

RFBURN

Offline rbcp

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Re: I'm a noob with a VX-7R.. advice please?
« Reply #2 on: November 04, 2010, 12:21:49 PM »
If you have a particular fast food place in mind that you want to take over, you can find out their models of headsets by calling them and asking.  Say you're with the Radio Enforcement Agency and that you've had complaints about their headsets interfering with local frequencies.  Get them to take off their headset and tell you the model number.  A Google search will then tell you which frequencies they run on.

Some people might say they're with the FCC when making a call like this, but I'm not sure if it's legal to impersonate the FCC, so making up an important sounding radio agency will sound just as good.

Offline Akilldema

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Re: I'm a noob with a VX-7R.. advice please?
« Reply #3 on: November 04, 2010, 01:02:27 PM »
Thanks to both of you guys, solid advice. I'll give calling them a shot.

Offline immabadspellor_

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Re: I'm a noob with a VX-7R.. advice please?
« Reply #4 on: November 07, 2010, 06:40:53 PM »
With just a VX-7 you are going to have to do things the old fashion way, they are most likely using the 70cm band for point to point communications (if they have not gone digital), which is 450mhz-470mhz. So plug 450 into your VX and start rolling through the freqs with a 10khz step. It may take awhile but it works. Do it in the restaurants parking lot, while there are customers, so you know when its active. Most have a tone that alerts the workers when a car pulls up. That's the dead give away you have the right freq.

I'd recommend using a 12.5kHz step for the 450-470MHz band.  This is the standard step for UHF NFM transmissions.  Using a 10kHz step will cause you to be off-frequency 75% of the time.  If you're close enough it may not matter and it will just be a weaker, distorted signal.  The VX-7 also has a feature called "Channel Counter" which will lock onto a nearby signal even if you don't know the exact frequency, just as long as you can get it close.  You can change it from a 5MHz swath to a 100MHz one, but I'd recommend the 5MHz as the smaller the range, the weaker the signal it will detect and drive-thru systems tend to not run a whole lot of power.  Read the manual for exactly how you accomplish this.  Also, the systems I've encountered in this frequency range often only transmit when a car is at the speaker, or when the employees are talking from headset to headset so that makes it more difficult to find.  Others will transmit all the time. 

There's other ranges you might want to scan, like 30-35MHz at a 5kHz step, and 150-156MHz although these are usually inputs.  Once you find one frequency, you should google it to find the other frequency as they usually use standard pairs.  As for the 450-470MHz ones, the frequency pairs are usually 5MHz off from each other.  Googling can also help you with CTCSS tones.  Doing it on your own, you should use the built in tone decoder on the INPUT frequency to determine the correct one.  RTFM on how to do that.  You could alternatively transmit every PL tone until you hear yourself on the output frequency if you have another radio, or you can just drive up to the speaker and listen until you hear something come out of it.  Some also transmit a quick DTMF tone along with the CTCSS.  One I've heard used a DTMF "0" to talk to the speaker and "#" to talk from headset to headset.  You can either hit it quick when transmitting, or set up the WIRES feature to automatically do it for you every time you transmit. 

If you have a particular fast food place in mind that you want to take over, you can find out their models of headsets by calling them and asking.  Say you're with the Radio Enforcement Agency and that you've had complaints about their headsets interfering with local frequencies.  Get them to take off their headset and tell you the model number.  A Google search will then tell you which frequencies they run on.

Before this stuff was all over the internet, I called a fast food restaurant and got the manufacturer and got them to read the channel/tone code sticker off of the unit above the drive thru cash register.  I didn't say I was from anything; they just obeyed without question!  Then I called the manufacturer (in this case HME), and told them I was a manager of a fast food restaurant and wanted to know the frequencies of the system so I could monitor my employees with a scanner.  They were able to tell me the frequencies in and out based on the single letter codes that were on the sticker of the unit.  They wouldn't give me the PL tone though.  Anyway, make sure to not only get the make and model of the unit, but any channel code that may be on a sticker on the unit.  You can still scan all possible frequencies by that manufacturer.  If all else fails, an FCC ID will appear on both the base and the headset itself and you can search this on the FCC's site and pull up the manuals and other documents that would have a list of all the possible frequencies they operate on. 

Offline gorgonzola5311

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Re: I'm a noob with a VX-7R.. advice please?
« Reply #5 on: December 15, 2010, 11:28:48 PM »
There's other ranges you might want to scan, like 30-35MHz at a 5kHz step, and 150-156MHz although these are usually inputs.

Is that why there are two frequencies for every fast food restaurant?  There is one near me that has a frequency of I believe 37.02 MHz, easily below what the VX-7R can handle.  If I were to transmit on the higher, 150-ish MHz that they also use, would the customers also hear me or only the clerks?  I'd hate to try and find another transmitter specifically for hitting those low frequencies.

Offline immabadspellor_

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Re: I'm a noob with a VX-7R.. advice please?
« Reply #6 on: December 27, 2010, 02:59:43 PM »
Is that why there are two frequencies for every fast food restaurant? 

Yes, because they use repeaters which have an input and an output.  The repeater/base transmits on one frequency, listens on another.  The headsets receive ONLY the base's transmit frequency. and transmit only on the frequency that the base receives.  If you take their headsets away from the restaurant a mile or so, they can no longer talk to each other. 

There is one near me that has a frequency of I believe 37.02 MHz, easily below what the VX-7R can handle.  If I were to transmit on the higher, 150-ish MHz that they also use, would the customers also hear me or only the clerks?  I'd hate to try and find another transmitter specifically for hitting those low frequencies.
Transmitting on the repeater's output on 37.02 (and using the same PL tone) would cause you only to be heard by the headsets.  The speaker is hardwired to the repeater so if the repeater is not receiving you, you're not getting through to the speaker.  If you were to transmit on the 150-ish MHz input you could be heard by either just the clerks or both the clerks and the customers.  Their headsets have two buttons, button A and button B.  One talks only headset to headset, one talks through the speaker to the customer (but the other headsets can hear, too).  Both buttons cause the headset to transmit on the same frequency.  The difference is the sub-audible tone, or PL tone transmitted.  For example, 88.5 Hz could be used for communications bound for the customer and 103.5 Hz could be used for headset to headset only.  The VX7 can search for these automatically but the problem with the automatic search is that it's SLOW.  If the person stops transmitting then it doesn't stop scanning for PL tones, it just keeps going so it ends up taking longer in the end because you end up searching some tones multiple times while skipping others.  Just put the radio on the repeater input frequency, enable TSQ (tone squelch) and adjust the RX/decode frequency until you hear audio.  ONLY adjust when they are transmitting (green light on) and allow one second or so per tone frequency.  Of course, if you have a receiver or would care to sit at the speaker yourself for a minute, it is possible to "brute force" it, transmitting with every tone until you hear something... but transmitting on frequencies you aren't licenced for is illegal so you shouldn't do that... yeah...