Tagged: telive

Telive osmo-tetra-sq5bpf: An Experimental TETRA Decoder that Enables Voice Decryption (If You Have the Key)

Thank you to Jacek / SQ5BPF for letting us know that he's recently released a modified version of the Telive TETRA decoder for Linux. The modification allows the user to listen to TEAx-encrypted voice signals if they have the decryption key. Typically, if a TETRA signal is encrypted, there is no way to listen to it, unless you have obtained the decryption key from the network operator, or extracted it from TETRA keyloader hardware.

But because the TEA1 encryption was broken due to a backdoor being discovered in 2023, he has also added support for using the 32-bit short key directly, which can be automatically recovered from TETRA traffic using his other software called teatime. TEA1 encryption is being phased out, but many deployments still use it.

The software is designed for advanced users to compile and run, so very little documentation is provided. However, there is a blog post here that explains the overall steps. Some additional information can be found on SQ5BPF's RadioReference post here.

TETRA Decoding (with telive on Linux)
TETRA Decoding (with telive on Linux)

SDR# TETRA Decoder Plugin Updated

The TETRA plugin for SDR# has been updated a few times since our last post on it back in March. The latest version can be downloaded directly here, and the original link comes from the Russian scanner forums.

In the new version the 'Net Info' button is now functioning and it is possible to see the current calls, groups, and meta information on the current cell and neighbour cell. It also appears that it has been updated to allow for multiple SDR# TETRA decoder instances to be opened simultaneously now for wider band monitoring.

SDR# TETRA Plugin Net Info Window
SDR# TETRA Plugin Net Info Window

Wintelive YouTube Demo

Over on YouTube use radiosification has uploaded a video showing the Windows TETRA decoder ‘wintelive’ in action. Wintelive is a Windows port of the popular RTL-SDR compatible Linux based ‘telive’ TETRA decoder. Back in October 2016 we posted about its release and we have a tutorial for telive and the RTL-SDR available here. 

The install instructions for wintelive are available on the authors webserver.

TETRA decoding on Windows!

A new TETRA voice and multiframe SDS decoder

Recently Marek Sebera of ITDS Consulting wrote in to let us know about two new TETRA decoders that they have released. TETRA is a trunked radio communications system that stands for “Terrestrial Trunked Radio”. It is used heavily in many parts of the world, except for the USA.

The first piece of software released is called TETRA Listener and is from the Brmlab hackerspace in Prague. They write that Tetra-Listener is a new program (based on osmo-tetra) that can decode unencrypted voice and data traffic. They also write that it is very easy to set up and install since it uses Vagrant, which is a system that can be used to automatically set up a VMWare or VirtualBox Virtual Machine that has everything set up and ready to go. The instructions for using the software can then be found in the readme of the main tetra-listener page on GitHub.

The second software they have written is what they believe is the world’s first open source TETRA Multiframe SDS decoder. SDS stands for short data service and is the TETRA equivalent to SMS text messages used on a GSM network. They write that their solution can assemble long multiframe SDS messages.

Previously we showed how unencrypted TETRA messages could be listened to using telive in our tutorial. It is good to see alternative solutions now coming out, and in the future we hope to test this new software out.

TETRA SDS Example
TETRA SDS Example