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World's Most Advanced Portable TV
Eric Schlaepfer writes "Here's another great toy for your wish list! ICOM manufactures the highly advanced IC-R3 portable scanner/television set. Besides picking up radio stations in the frequency range of 0.495-2450MHz, the IC-R3 also receives regular television signals, amateur television, and wireless security camera signals."
In case the site (or routes to the site) get slashdotted. Here is a mirror to link one, and link two.
This is hardly new - the IC-R3 has been out in Japan since before I bought my ICOM scanner (I'm at work atm so I can't check, but it's an R5, I think) a couple of years ago.
While the Icom R-3 truly is a cool little gadget, I wish to caution those who are buying one for video monitoring purposes. It has a lot of features, to be sure, but as I found out the hard way, for the hardcore video monitoring enthusiast or TV DXer, it has some serious limitations.
Its sensitivity is lacking, so unless it encounters a very strong video signal (especially on 2.4GHz, where a lot of wireless cameras broadcast their signals), do not expect a very watchable or even decodeable picture.
Secondly, the video screen eats the hell out of the battery life. You'll find yourself reaching for the AC adapter quite frequently. This device tends to use the LCD screen to display a lot of configuration/tuning information, even in non-video mode, so beware if you buy this to use as a general-purpose scanner.
After 10 months of R3 ownership, my feelings are still mixed. It's pretty cool to walk around and stumble on 2.4GHz video, especially from wireless security cameras, but as a general-purpose scanning receiver or for attempting to receive TV DX in these skip-prone months, it falls sadly short.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
Still ... $450 for a ultra-wide band WITH a 2" TFT ...
Only better (at 10x the price) would be the AR-one here, almost forgot ... have to be a non-US location to ship to ...
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
C.Crane, $449.95
http://www.ccrane.com/icom_icr3.asp
Frequency Range:
USA version: 0.495-815.995 MHz, 902-2450.095 MHz
Non-USA version: 0.495-2450.095 MHz
Ok, so where can I buy a Non-USA version? And price.
Take a look here for some specs. Unfortunately, this receiver has been out for a few years now, and has never had reviews that are all that stunning. Complaints are generally regarding poor sensitivity, which as a owner of a IC-Q7A (Icom's ham version of the IC-R2), doesn't surprise me one bit.
What always surprised me was the crummy UI on this thing. You've got a full color dot matrix display on the thing -- why isn't there a sophisticated OS, slick icons, and on-screen help guide? Why isn't there a flashable ROM for OS upgrades? How about a smartmedia slot to store screenshots? It's almost as if they're afraid to sell too many of the things, so they cripple it my making it cryptic to use, with a lousy UI, and no features.
I'm going to agree with others, this isn't new.. I've been drooling over this radio for something like 2 years now.
One downside that I've found in my reading is that when you're using the bigger lcd (for tv and better scanner control) it drains your batteries much faster. You can control the scanner with the smaller lcd, but I think more complex options need the color lcd to set. If you're running it at home on an AC adapter, then you're okay, but mobile is kinda limited with the effect video reception/display has on battery life.
Then again, if you're the kind of person that drives around with their laptop searching for wifi networks, you might be used to that kind of battery life already.
The problem is that it used to be legal to build and sell a general coverage receiver that covered DC to Daylight. There were laws that restricted what you could do with some of signals you received, such as prohibiting disclosure to third parties, but the general principle was that any American was free to listen to anything transmitted on the public airwaves.
Enter cellular telephony (AMPS), which replaced the old mobile telephone service. Eventually, some bright bulb rediscovered that cellular telephone conversations were transmitted via UHF FM radio signals, without any encryption or signal security. Anyone with a UHF FM receiver, or an older VHF/UHF television set, could listen in on cellular phone calls. When the word got around to the general public that cellular calls were not private, the CTIA (cellular trade association) went nuts. This was a public relations problem that could hurt their sales and profits. Rather than fix the problem of broadcasting cellular calls in the clear, their "solution" was to lobby congress for a law that would prohibit sales of receivers that could listen to cellular telephone frequencies, and would criminalize the act of listening to a cellular telephone call. This was the first time that congress had made it illegal to listen to a radio signal. Of course, none of this made a damn bit of difference as to the security of a cellular telephone call. It just provided the illusion of security, which was all the CTIA was willing to pay for. It also gave a big stick to politicians who were embarrassed by the public disclosure of the contents of their cellular telephone calls. They could demand that the government prosecute the "criminals" who had the gall to embarrass them by publicizing their dirty laundry.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I used to have a uniden bearcat scanner back in the early 90s that could receive all of the normal frequencies (except for the military ones).
Great fun, could listen to all of the emergency services, all cell phones (they were all analog at the time), cordless phones, with a little serial port interface, you could decode pager text messages, etc.
I sold it off on EBay just before they clamped down on "frequency-unlocked" scanners.
Now 95% of cell phones are digital and encrypted/compressed, and most of the emergency services have scrambled. Cordless phones have gone spread-spectrum with some of them having basic or digital scrambling as well. Pagers have all but vanished in place of cheap digital cell phones and text messages.
Kind of like the demise of the BUD (big ugly dish) that was used for pulling down raw analog feeds once everyone starting going digitally compressed/encrypted.
But it was fun while it lasted.
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
Keep in mind that if you live in a large metropolitan area most public service broadcasts (fire, police) use trunked systems. A scanner like this won't help you much when trying to follow any activity on a trunked system. Many even use digital trunking, which you can't monitor at all unless you get a scanner such as the Bearcat BC250D and the optional BCi 25D digital card.
Blocked analog cellular is nothing new here in the US. It really isn't a big deal as fewer people use analog cellular anymore. Most scanners can be opened up to receive the cellular bands, but it usually takes some skill with a soldering iron (I'm not sure if this receiver can be easily modified in this way).
While it may help a little bit to put on an antenna tuned more closely to 2.4 GHz, the effect would be marginal. The problem isn't necessarily that the antenna isn't getting the signal good enough, it's that the receiver circuitry is less sensitive in the 2.4 GHz range.
;-) ). Then you can tune your receiver to either 1.450 GHz (2.45 GHz - 1.00 GHz) and find a slightly weaker copy of the 2.45 GHz signal there. If the increased sensitivity of your receiver in the 1.45 GHz area is larger than the decrease in the signal strength by mixing (which is probably some calculable amount, but I don't want to take the time to figure it out...), then you will end up with a clearer picture of the 2.45 GHz video signal.
It's very difficult to create a tuning circuit (which all receivers have) that is very sensitive across a wide range of frequencies. I would guess that this receiver is most sensitive in the VHF/UHF or even 800 MHz bands. From the specs, it looks like the upper end of the range for the R-3 is 2540 MHz (2.54 GHz), which isn't necessarily the clear-cut end of receiving capability for the product, it's just where the engineers (or marketers) decided to print the cutoff because the sensitivity drops off quickly somewhere around there.
The solution might be a 'transverter' device which essentially acts as another IF stage in the receiver, mixing all input signals with a fixed frequency. The result is several sidebands, at least one of which is offset from the input signal by the value of the fixed frequency.
Example: You want to see a video transmission on 2.450 GHz, but the receiver is not sensitive there. You build a little circuit that uses a diode to mix the incoming frequency with a 1000 MHz signal generated by a crystal (good luck finding a 1GHz crystal
This technique is sometimes used by folks who really want to break US law and listen to cell-phone conversations. Nevermind that nowadays analog calls are nearly extinct. By law all receivers sold in the US must block tuning in of the cell-phone frequencies, which are around 850-900 MHz. (That's different these days with digital, but we're talking about analog.). Since nearly all receivers of FM audo use an IF (Intermediate Frequency, like the 1000 MHz signal we used above) of 10.7 MHz, users found they could tune to some multiple of 10.7 MHz below or above the cell phone frequencies and hear the 'images' of the calls. Nowadays scanner manufacturers extend those blocked frequencies to the image frequencies as well, so most folks are out-of-luck unless they build their own receiver for 850 MHz.
I bought mine in 1987, w/the video adapter. Interesting for a few months... //de KQ6J
Those old Motorola phones (with the trapezoidal batteries on back) are still fairly popular in Alaska due to the fact that they have decent talk time in the cold. Most phones with smaller batteries cool off too fast, and thus can give you as little as 10 minutes of air time in cold weather.
I had this AWESOME little CDMA phone when I was in Japan...a list of features that would be found only in the $300+ range in the US today (and it was the CHEAPEST PHONE AVAILABLE AT THE TIME....THREE YEARS AGO), a battery I'd charge AT MOST once a week...but if I tried using it outside at anything below about 10F, it'd die in 15 minutes.
Sometimes you lose something when you upgrade.
Just a note for those not aware... buying a scanner capable of receiving the cell band is illegal in the US, as is listening in. (ie, unlike many things, just owning a scanner capable of listening to the cell bands is illegal, although I think people who had them prior to the law were 'grandfathered')
Not that I personally have any objections to this, just figured I'd point out that if you're a US resident not wishing to go to jail, you may wish to buy cell-blocked versions.
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suwain_2