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Comment by Gordonjcp | Hacker News Reader

This is *exactly* what someone in Yorkshire found out a few years ago when he wrote a bot to post Fire and Rescue pager messages to Twitter.

It's worth pointing out that it's almost impossible to get Ofcom to prosecute you for anything to do with receiving and recording radio traffic, or even transmitting illegally, as long as you're not making a nuisance of yourself.

This is generally how laws work in the UK. You can do it right up to the point at which it pisses people off enough that the legal system has to act.

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Funny.. In the Netherlands there's a website that's exactly this. https://monitor.p2000alarm.nl

Not only is it legal but many police forces around the country use this site to keep an eye on the traffic. At least they did more than a decade ago.

Note that there is also an encrypted version of this system that's not publicly accessible. I'm not sure about the quality of the encryption used, but I do know that police traffic and ambulance traffic often goes via encrypted channels.

I'm also not sure if this is a system that's legally protected or that the government simply hasn't bothered trying to take these sites down.

That's called C2000 yes but it's mainly for voice. It can handle text messages too. It's based on Tetra. And it's two-way. Indeed very well encrypted.

P2000 is one way and based on FLEX, a paging protocol. It's indeed only used for fire and ambulance. The police data is too sensitive so they use C2000. Though you will see police traffic related to accidents etc.

But no P2000 isn't protected and the government even used that website themselves :) Not officially though, I guess.

I think this is also because most fire departments use a lot of volunteers which makes their activities a lot more public.

I set up the SDR dongle and app on my laptop and played around with it for a few hours. It was pretty interesting to see just how many pagers still seem to be in use. A lot of it seemed to be alerts from sensors of various types - refrigeration and things like that. But the majority looked to be from hospitals. Including what seemed to be patient data.

All the retained and volunteer fire stations around the UK use pagers, because they're simple, reliable, and moderately firefighter-resistant - and about 70 quid to replace when they get smashed, deep-sixed, melted, driven over by the pump, or chewed by a dog. Yes, this week alone.

They're used for alerting rather than paging, in that the message is four flashing LEDs and a lot of beeping rather than a description of the incident, and as such the paging transmitters just transmit a unique number rather than a message. The message is always "get to the fire station right now".

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