Keyloading and Over the Air Questions

Forum dedicated to discussion on EF Johnson Radio products such as the VP8000, VP6000, VP5000, VM7000, VM6000, radios. Support for Armada software platform.

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W0VNE
Posts: 41
Joined: Fri Apr 17, 2015 1:51 pm

Keyloading and Over the Air Questions

Post by W0VNE »

I've got no serious reason to need encryption other then being curious and wanting to play around with something new. I have some EFJ 5300s that have the old transcrypt 460 scramblers built in. Some of the radios have keys in them from the previous owners and I can turn on selectable mode and when I switch to secure (from clear) I get a nice burst of data and some very ununderstandable scrambled voice on a scanner. So.... If all I want to do is get the key from a radio that has a working key is the process to Over The Air this info? I'm digging around the doc I have and its a little bit over my head. I'm confused how transmitting your KEY over the air is a good crypto idea? Maybe I've seen too many spy movies. *Which is probably the only reason I'm spending anytime doing this. I see that each radio has a unique radio serial number. Is that connected with turning on DES or whatever? And is it hardware (Like a module that does AES or DES) that is optional or is it just code for the DSP / Radio that lets it do these modes?

One of the radios I expected to be keyed ok gives me a key error *Because I took off the covers to clean up some human slime and the dead man switch seems to have dumped all the keys. VERY spy movie like!

I understand the usual process is to have a special cable and a special caculator "Keyloader" and go from radio to radio and inject new keys. I'm not that interested in spending the money on a keyloader.

Last question. Is the "key" for transcript 460 scrambling the same key that would be used for DES or DES-XL (Or AES) The radios I've been fiddling with have the DES and DES-XL option in the PCC software but it seems that 460 Scrambling works fine but trying to do DES gives me errors. Is the DES a different key (Location?) or something else I'm not understanding? I will try to get OTA working but if someone has an "idiots guide" to that I would sure appreciate it.
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