Two-way Radio Preparedness

I bought 10 old Nextel i355 cellphones which have a feature called Direct Talk that turns this old cellphone into a two-radio radio. No cell tower required. The great thing is that these use frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) and a VSLEP (vector sum linear excited prediction) commonly called the iden vocoder so that a scanner can't hear them. As of yet anyway. Not even the DSD+ radio data decoding software can pick them up as of this writing. I'm not sure if Motorola owns the patent on this scheme or not which would dictate whether a software or scanner could decode it.

Why do I have so many? Two reasons. One is that I like having plenty of two-way radios for SHTF communications just in case. And two, I'm doing a project where I will have all these cellphones plugged into 10 USB sound cards and recording audio into 10 instances of Windows XP in VMware virtual machines. Seen as how there are 10 channels and 15 codes, I can have each cellphone listen to one channel at a time on all 15 codes and if anyone talks on one of these cellphones I'll hear it and record it. So cellphone 1 would be listening to channel 1 and all 15 codes. Cellphone 2 would be listening to channel 2 and all 15 codes, etc. All fed into my laptop on my desk here I use for my scanner and FTP server.

Now there is a feature in these cellphones to use a fake phone number giving you an even more private communication between your party. But I found it to be a PITA to use because it looks like you have to pull that number up each time you want to press the push to talk (PTT) button. So I'm thinking most won't do this and if anyone is withen a mile of me and uses one of these I'll hopefully hear them. LOL!

It's been quite the project so far and cost me a lot. Now I'm just waiting for some stereo jacks to solder up some cables.