Category: Radio

ICE protest surveillance

On By Paul HubbardIn Law enforcement, Politics, Radio, recommendationsLeave a comment

As I have written about before, taking your phone to a protest is 100% going to get you written into various government data stores. This story today confirms that ICE is using Stingrays.

So. As explained in Domestic surveillance and police riots, you can get a cheap Android device to communicate and photograph; since then there’s a new EFF project called Rayhunter that I’d also highly recommend. It’s inexpensive and quite simple:

  1. Go to Amazon and spend 31 bucks on an Orbic LTE router.
  2. Go to the Github page and get the Rayhunter firmware for it
  3. Install it
  4. Take the Rayhunter with you – even without connecting it to a computer, it will display if it detects a Stingray or other cell-site simulator.
  5. Consider a donation to the EFF for work like this.

A picture, just to show what it looks like. There are other supported devices and many places to buy them; this was easiest at the time.

P.S. – on Mac, you may need to run this to remove the app-signing error:

xattr -c installer

Hey Verizon, you’ve got a problem in 92122

On By Paul HubbardIn Radio, Random, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’m a long time customer and former employee, with an MSEE and ham radio license. I play with SDR for fun – I’m no pro but I’m familiar with radio and cellular. My bonafides explained, this post explains the problem, what I tried and why you lost me today as a customer.

A few months ago we started to have problems. Calls are fine, but data is super slow and my battery was being murdered. With my iPhone 11 Pro, a bit under two years old and 83% battery health, requires two to three charges per day something is wrong.

It just discharges too fast

Second symptom: it works fine out of the home area, very approximately the 92122 zip code. As you can see from the screenshots on Nextdoor, others have the same problems. As the meme says, “I am not a crank.”

I called service and tried to explain. They sent me a new SIM, we reset networks and nothing helped. I wasn’t able to explain that the issue wasn’t me and that others were affected.

So today we’re all onto “Consumer Cellular”. Good price, stellar service so far, and instead of 12mbps I got

So Verizon, I think you’ve got a problem. Could be too many subscribers for the base station, failed antenna lobe, I can’t tell. Apple and the carriers have blocked key diagnostics like SNR so all I can do is speculate. You could sort it out with a test if your mobile coverage and I hope you do. It’s a pity to see the stellar reputation of Verizon Wireless being lost.

Update 12/1/2021 – I reached out to VerizonSupport on Twitter and they are promising to investigate. I spoke to a couple of different reps, one of whom said there was a known outage in the area.