LeakyFeeder wrote:At the end of the day all u need is one person who is knowledgable in radio an determined then decides to muck about on the air freqs an u have a big problem...
All the technology inc doppler gear, fingerprint software an spooks crawling about will find it very very hard to find someone.... Throw in the equasion extremely low power n its like looking for a needle in a field full of haystacks.....
You're right about how easy it would be to start TXing on airband but I think it would probably prove far easier to catch somebody doing that than you may think.
Radio technology could be used to identify an approximate location very quickly, although you are right that actually pinpointing and intercepting a mobile transmitter would be very difficult using these techniques.
However, stop thinking about this as a radio problem from this point onwards...
As soon as the police become involved, they can get access to all sorts of information that your average DFer wouldn't even think of.
I imagine one of the firsts things they would be do would be to start checking with all the major radio retailers, as well as eBay and Amazon etc. for any recent sales of equipment that was capable of transmitting AM between 118-137 MHz.
It would then be relatively easy to request the customer's address details from each seller (backed up by law) and start narrowing down this list to the area of interest.
It would be possible (indeed trivial) to use transmitter fingerprinting techniques to positively identify the transmitter involved in the offense. They would only need to catch one transmission to be able to do this - the technology is even in use on some amateur repeaters, so it's hardly James Bond stuff...
If it were me, my next step would be to start knocking on doors and sampling every radio on my list until I found the one that had the fingerprint that I was looking for. If I knocked on a door and the occupant was evasive or seemed overly nervous, I would make a note of who they were and start paying particular attention to them. Even if they weren't the culprit, chances are they are up to something.
The police have a lot of experience conducting investigations and their techniques have been refined over time. They have the law behind them and I really do believe that if they really wanted to catch you doing something like this, it would only be a matter of time before they did.
I'm not saying it would be impossible to stay off their radar and to do this without being caught but it would require a significant amount of forethought and planning. In reality, most people just wouldn't even think about half this stuff.