-EM> Communications Privacy Act of 1986.  The cellular industry
-EM> lobbied for
-EM> and got this because the old (VHF?) mobile phones were very
-EM> easy to
-EM> listen to.
Regency even encouraged it, a friend brought a scanner over for me to look at 
and I was surprised to see in the manual that it had a feature that would 
automatically make it resume scanning if it came across the tone that the old 
IMTS stations used to xmit.
The IMTS stations used to xmit a relatively high pitched tone when there was 
no call going on. This made scanning impossible unless you had the feature 
mentioned above.
Fortunately it's all going to be a thing of the past, with TDMA and CDMA 
coming into more widespread use. Maybe soon we'll be able to read this echo 
without having to wade thru so many messages about monitoring AMPS's.
Speaking of TDMA, Nextel is up and running in the Boston market. They're 
using TDMA, I spoke with one of their reps on their system for a bit and I 
have to admit that it sounded pretty good. They're rates aren't really that 
great, they don't differentiate between peak and offpeak like the traditional 
cellular companies do. For around $45 a month you can get 100 minutes and 
after that it's 24 cents a minute day or nite, no interconnect charges unless 
you call LD which is an additional 15 cents a minute.
If you use your phone during the day, Nextel seems worth a look as the 24 
cents a minute can't be beat.
The only drawback is that they don't have any real phones, they're all shirt 
pocket phones. For mobile operation you can't beat a nice transporatable or 
installed unit with a quality antenna in the middle of the roof.
---
---------------