[EA]

In the late 1980's I had this VCR that would allow me to tune into over the air TV channels in the eastern US.

Being an elementary aged student poking around, I realized I could use the tuner to listen in to telephone calls somehow. Granted, I lived on a farm and there were probably only two dozen houses within a mile radius of our home; the nearest being a quarter mile away. I had a small rabbit ear antenna on the back of my CRT TV that could have been plugged into the VCR.

I don't recall the actual hardware I had.

I never figured out if I was listening to cordless phones (seems they would not be powerful enough to reach me), cell phone signals (there were few cell phones in my poor rural community I assume but I guess there could have been travelers on a nearby highway), or CB radio signals from truckers on the highway (these seemed like mundane person to person conversations; not trucker conversations). Perhaps it could have been long distance HAM operators though they didn't seem to use any HAM protocols while speaking.

[ashleyn]

Likely first-gen cell phone service (AMPS)[1]. Calls were entirely unencrypted analogue audio transmitted in bands formerly allocated to UHF television. Your VCR was likely a pre-83 model, which is when the frequencies were reallocated to AMPS[2].

[1]: https://www.telecomtrainer.com/amps-cellular/

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-American_television_freq...