Source: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/interception-and-divulg... via https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/4nhg7h/legalities_o...
The text messages that float about in the ether these days aren’t messages between individuals, they’re monitoring alerts (refrigeration systems, computers), and medical (doctors being paged, order to clean hospital rooms, calls for medical transport). That’s the case at least here in my medium-sized town in the US Midwest. It could be very different elsewhere.
Vancouver Coastal Health claims they "have no information to suggest private patient information has been used in any malicious way", which is a very disingenuous statement to make, because there's no conceivable way for them to know who has received radio transmissions or made use of such data maliciously. To be frank, I find this pretty mind-blowing and it's disappointing that even in the face of press/public attention, it's not being remedied.
[0] https://openprivacy.ca/blog/2019/09/09/open-privacy-discover...
[1] https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/pager-systems-used-in-healthca...
[2] https://openprivacy.ca/blog/2019/09/26/pager-breach-update/
That's their story. They can then go on to describe the actual issues, namely the plain-text broadcast that made your proof of concept possible, and state in all honesty that it'd be ten minutes work for a bad actor to set up another, similar, site – and less to just gather (and later sell) the private medical data. Plus, it's not wildly unethical! (Might still be illegal, though.) This is drawing attention to an issue that they're well aware of, and are doing nothing about, in a way that minimises public access to these medical records – one could argue it's positively ethical.
… Though, actually, it'd probably be better to do to somebody in charge first, since perhaps only with such a mock-up would they truly understand. They might genuinely not be aware, thinking it's just some obscure issue.
[0] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-individuals/guidance-materials...
nothing fancy
The one notable exception is https://www.adsbexchange.com/, which actually allows you to just show just military aircraft or just aircraft that have been tagged as interesting (typically planes owned by high profile people like Bill Gates, large corporations, or news and police helicopters).
It’s kind of fun to zoom their map out to the continental US and put on the military filter. At any given moment there are a surprising number of military aircraft over the US.
Source: lived in LA and the Bay Area.
You can't cheat physics, you do in fact need the right antenna. I don't know what else to tell you.
Transmiting is very "dangerous" if you don't know what you're doing, and likely illegal unless you're licensed (you're only allowed to broadcast on certain frequencies below certain power limits without a license, but you can still cause trouble).
Tl;Dr Please do not experiment with transmitting if you don't know what you're doing.
>Communications directly related to the immediate safety of human life or the protection of property may be provided by amateur stations to broadcasters for dissemination to the public where no other means of communication is reasonably available before or at the time of the event.
Great hardware with driver/software compatibility
The NESDRs are much more accurate than the no-names and don't drift. I was flabbergasted when I plugged one in, tuned it to a nearby NOAA weather transmitter, fired up gqrx, and saw that it was spot-on without having to adjust the frequency error. Also, they have SMA connectors instead of the dodgy barrel connectors on the no-names.