In the early 90's I used an old VCR tuner (over the air) to listen to telephone conversations people were making. I lived in an extremely rural area and had few neighbors.
I did something similar to this. I found that if I held down the talk button on a walkie-talkie and crossed its antenna with that of a portable TV, I was able to tune into analog cellular calls. I would adjust the frequency on the (analog, nondiscrete) TV tuner to listen to different calls.