A satellite dish can be lots of phun watching all that shit, but few people know it can also be used as a wiretapping device. All you need is your basic home satellite system, also know as TVRO or televison receive only. What you need to do is turn to the AT&T satellite known as Telstar 301. You'll notice between channel 20 and 23 you will see a blank screen as if there was a station there. You won't hear anything except maybe an occasional garbled sound.
This blank screen contains 12 MHz of phone calls, each phone call takes up only about 3.5KHz of this bandwidth so quite a few calls can be packed on one of these birds. What you do to listen in to these calls is the following. Take a genral coverage shortwave receiver and hook it's antenna to the video out of the TVRO receiver. Make sure your satellite receiver is either on channel 21 or 22. Set your shortwave reciever on lower side band (LSB) or turn the BFO on. You will now be able to tune between 1.6Mhz and 7.5Mhz picking up more calls to Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Alaska, and the Caribbean than you ever though possible. Who would have dreamed there would have been that many phone calls to listen to?
About every 3 1/2 Kilohertz there is a phone conversation. If you do not hear a phone converstation you will hear a trunk idle, a continuous 2600hz, tone. Since these are inband analog trunks you can acutally listen for a click and a string of MF tones followed by a ring!
For frequencies above 4.1 MHz, it is best to switch to upper side band. Also you can tune in Channel 8 of telstar 301, this seems to be US Sprint service form the mainland to Hawaii. Sprint Codes can be gotten successfully by listening to the calls.
Telstar 301 can be found at 96W on the satellite dish. Spacenet 2, which is located at 69W is all US Sprint. Domestic calles as well as overseas calls can be monitored.
Other intresting satelites are ASC1 at 128W, Westar 2 at 79 W, and Comstar D4 at 76W. On these, simply tune across until you hit a blank channel that looks like it's carrying a signal. Then tune the shortwave receiver anywhere between 1.6 and 7.5 Mhz. If the conversation doesn't straighten up swith to LSB or USB on the shortwave.