First Phone

[Copper]

My uncle had a very early car phone, there was a suitcase-sized box in the trunk. And the handpiece and dial mounted on the console.

[George K]

@copper yup that was my Uniden, but the box in the trunk was only lunchbox-sized, iirc.

[Klaus]

@george-k said in First Phone:

My first "mobile" phone was a Uniden. It was built into my car and had an antenna on the rear passenger window.

I remember that my father had something similar. It cost as much as a small car. You couldn’t just call the phone. Rather, one had to know approximately where the car is to be able to call.

By the way, 3W isn’t a lot. A mobile ham radio transceiver for 2m band will usually have at least 50W, which, with a car antenna, is sufficient for maybe 20 miles of reach (OTOH, with a good antenna and shortwave and CW instead of speech you can reach somebody 5000 miles away with 1W)

[jon-nyc]

I had 1,2,4,5,7,8,9 and others.

[Klaus]

I got my first mobile phone later than most of my peers. Must have been 1998 or so. Wasn’t a Nokia, but something cheaper from Asia.

[George K]

@klaus I had no idea.

Somewhere, I read that todays hand-held cellphones only have 0.3W of power.

If only JBryan were here to comment...

[Klaus]

@george-k said in First Phone:

Somewhere, I read that todays hand-held cellphones only have 0.3W of power.

I believe they typically have a peak power of about 2W, which would be ok to reach a tower within 5 miles or so. In good circumstances it can be significantly more. I guess @Axtremus could correct me if I’m wrong.

I’ve had friends who were using the moon as a deflector of UHF signals to talk to people far away, and that worked with surprisingly low power.

[Mik]

@jon-nyc said in First Phone:

I had 1,2,4,5,7,8,9 and others.

Technoslut.

[Axtremus]

Between #1 and #2, a Qualcomm phone that looked something like this:

[George K]

Mrs. George still misses her flip phones.

[89th]

@george-k said in First Phone:

Mrs. George still misses her flip phones.

Hey, I enjoyed the size (and battery life) of the flip phone. Although the "texting" (press 8 three times to type a letter) is funny to think about now.

For me, #2 was my first one. Didn't have my own cell phone until senior year of college. I know some of you are a little older than me, but for those in my generation and younger, it's almost hard to imagine what college was like before you could just text someone anytime. We <gasp> would have to tell someone ahead of time where/when we would be and if we got there early we would just.......wait, until the other person (hopefully) showed up. What a time.