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Carphones were originally possible because the antenna could be bigger ( it was just another metal stick on your roof/trunk) and more powerful (you didn't care if it was broadcasting at a couple of watts because it wasn't directly by your head/crotch). Reducing both antenna size and broadcast power cuts down range, so yea. In the same way mm5G can be a block-by-block proposition, basic cellular coverage could be considered that way in the early (and probably into the mid) 90s. ETA: a page snipe with shameful coverage
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Aug 2, 2022 13:36
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Some European countries had cityphone networks, IIRC Germany had the "Handyphone" network that only worked in the city you lived in. AMPS (analogue) cellular networks had a range of about five miles on a handheld, much longer on a car phone. Of course in 1988 you weren't going to have AMPS cells in the middle of nowhere because the customer base wasn't there. AMPS was low frequency and penetrated buildings pretty well.
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Aug 2, 2022 14:16
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Analog mobile systems like the AMPS were pretty wild in that calls really were just transmitted over radio, so you could tune in with a scanner to eavesdrop on other people's calls. NMT at least had some rudimentary scrambling that made that strategy unviable.
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Aug 2, 2022 14:41
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barbecue at the folks posted:Analog mobile systems like the AMPS were pretty wild in that calls really were just transmitted over radio, so you could tune in with a scanner to eavesdrop on other people's calls. NMT at least had some rudimentary scrambling that made that strategy unviable. Until the last couple of years, scanners in the US had to omit the 900mhz range to avoid accidentally intercepting cell phone calls, as they were protected by law, but not by any technological reason.
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Aug 2, 2022 15:00
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Neito posted:Until the last couple of years, scanners in the US had to omit the 900mhz range to avoid accidentally intercepting cell phone calls, as they were protected by law, but not by any technological reason. Let me guess, if you bought the right model radio this omission could be "fixed" with 10 seconds of soldering?
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Aug 2, 2022 15:23
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evobatman posted:Let me guess, if you bought the right model radio this omission could be "fixed" with 10 seconds of soldering? Nearly all of them, yup. It was just a filter IIRC. Kinda like MARS mods on modern radios so they can transmit outside of 2m/70cm.
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Aug 2, 2022 15:38
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Neito posted:Until the last couple of years, scanners in the US had to omit the 900mhz range to avoid accidentally intercepting cell phone calls, as they were protected by law, but not by any technological reason. My dad ran a scanner 24/7 (newspaper photographer so it was mostly a job thing) when I was a kid and teenager. Older cordless phones and cell phones provided hours of entertainment for him and a friend who also ran one 24/7. They would trade tapes and follow poo poo like it was a soap opera, particularly the guy who was in a constant, desperate battle to keep his wife from finding out about his girlfriend, and keeping his other girlfriend from finding out about either of them. My personal favorites were one of this dude's friends was going off on a long rant about being in jail and kicking people's asses, and then abruptly saying "but there's only one thing I know for sure, and that's that Jesus Christ died for me", and the dude who had a yard sale every single weekend with stuff he scavenged from the landfill.
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Aug 2, 2022 16:06
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Rev. Bleech_ posted:My dad ran a scanner 24/7 (newspaper photographer so it was mostly a job thing) when I was a kid and teenager. Older cordless phones and cell phones provided hours of entertainment for him and a friend who also ran one 24/7. They would trade tapes and follow poo poo like it was a soap opera, particularly the guy who was in a constant, desperate battle to keep his wife from finding out about his girlfriend, and keeping his other girlfriend from finding out about either of them. I recently got into WebSDR and listening to HAM radio broadcasts around the states. I also started typing out the weird conversations, and while most are pretty dumb, sometimes people troll each other and it's hilarious. Might one day make a thread about it and post all the logs, but I'm not really ready for primetime on that.
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Aug 2, 2022 16:29
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LifeSunDeath posted:I recently got into WebSDR and listening to HAM radio broadcasts around the states. I also started typing out the weird conversations, and while most are pretty dumb, sometimes people troll each other and it's hilarious. Might one day make a thread about it and post all the logs, but I'm not really ready for primetime on that. A lot of it has moved over to digital, but you can still find some of the Greatest Hits of Ham Radio, such as: 1) Guy going lightning fast through a contest pile up so fast you'd think you had a stroke 2) Three chuds ragchewing on 14.whatever MHz. 3) That one loving nutso repeater in LA that's basically 4chan but for Ham Radio.
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Aug 2, 2022 17:25
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Neito posted:A lot of it has moved over to digital, but you can still find some of the Greatest Hits of Ham Radio, such as: Heard guy doing a great Boomhauer impression for a long time making this other old guy mad as hell. Heard a guy talk in tongues and ramble some light racism at a young operator who had an accent, but the young guy kept saying "Shut the hell up, gramps. I got a big HAM over here and you can't do anything about it." which made me loving laugh. Lots and lots of complaining about lawn problems, and gas prices related to lawn mowing.
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Aug 2, 2022 17:36
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LifeSunDeath posted:I recently got into WebSDR and listening to HAM radio broadcasts around the states. I also started typing out the weird conversations, and while most are pretty dumb, sometimes people troll each other and it's hilarious. Might one day make a thread about it and post all the logs, but I'm not really ready for primetime on that. The dormant podcast "Silent Key" was nothing but weird HAM conversations, run by one of the Jerk City guys.
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Aug 2, 2022 18:08
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HAM radio sounds like Chatroulette except you can't see that the dude you're talking to is jacking off.
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Aug 2, 2022 18:29
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Rev. Bleech_ posted:The dormant podcast "Silent Key" was nothing but weird HAM conversations, run by one of the Jerk City guys. Ironic that it's dormant, cus Silent Key is a euphemism for a dead operator. Flash Gordon Ramsay posted:HAM radio sounds like Chatroulette except you can't see that the dude you're talking to is jacking off. It's honestly a lot of fun, especially the worldwide chatroom that is FT8 and JS8, but you have to be of a technical mind. If you're interested, SA has a club in SHSC I think?
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Aug 2, 2022 19:05
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My first cellphone was a dual-band Qualcomm that could handle both analog and digital cell signals. I got it specifically because at the time there was no digital cell service at the coast, only analog, and if I wanted to get out of town for a bit needed to be reachable by work because there was a bunch of poo poo only I knew how to do.
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Aug 2, 2022 19:19
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Early cordless phones were even easier to eavesdrop on than early cell phones. An older nerd of my acquaintance, thirty-some-odd years ago, had a scanner with a bigass antenna and would occasionally listen in on strangers' calls just for the hell of it. (Hey, it was at least as interesting as daytime TV.) And one time, a conversation something along these lines took place: "It smells weird in here." "Weird how?" "You know when you first turn the stove on? Kind of like that." "Huh." "Yeah, no idea. Anyway, I've got to go, I'm getting a headache. Think I'll take a nap or something." "Okay, cool. Talk to you later."My friend of course wanted to jump in and yell "Nooooo, get out of there, there's like two different ways you could die" but it was just a receiver, there was no way to do that. And calling 911 would have been useless -- what would you even say? "Someone within a mile or two of here is in danger, or possibly it's someone that's who-knows-where that someone in this town was talking to on the phone, come to think of it I don't know which party was local." No idea how the story ended, of course.
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Aug 2, 2022 19:38
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Slow-scan TV is maybe my favorite part of ham radio. Basically, you put your callsign and a short text message on top of an image, then transmit it on one of the unofficial SSTV frequencies. If somebody receives you and likes/hates your image, they'll respond to you by putting your callsign and their own callsign on a different image and sending it back. You can see some examples at https://worldsstv.com/ There are a lot of flags and boomer memes, and a lot of women... sometimes with the thirsty ham operator crudely photoshopped into the picture. On the other hand you'll sometimes get nice pictures of people's ham shacks, or pictures of their grandkids or pets, or (very rarely) an actually funny image. The best thing is that you can enjoy it passively: just tune in, start the decoding software, and come back a few hours later to see what got picked up. Pedant note: it's "ham radio", not "HAM radio". It's not an acronym for anything.
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Aug 2, 2022 19:39
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Pham Nuwen posted:Slow-scan TV is maybe my favorite part of ham radio. Basically, you put your callsign and a short text message on top of an image, then transmit it on one of the unofficial SSTV frequencies. If somebody receives you and likes/hates your image, they'll respond to you by putting your callsign and their own callsign on a different image and sending it back. Gotta page Johnny290 here, but I don’t know how. Either way, the ISS has a SSTV transmitter that you can receive images from as it passes overhead. Images… from… space Freakin cool man
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Aug 2, 2022 19:44
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Pham Nuwen posted:Pedant note: it's "ham radio", not "HAM radio". It's not an acronym for anything. What, you don't use your MAC to access the WEB?
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Aug 2, 2022 19:55
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I was never a ham person, but I read HamSexy anyway because there's nothing I like more than people poking fun at super niche things.
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Aug 2, 2022 19:59
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Powered Descent posted:Early cordless phones were even easier to eavesdrop on than early cell phones. An older nerd of my acquaintance, thirty-some-odd years ago, had a scanner with a bigass antenna and would occasionally listen in on strangers' calls just for the hell of it. (Hey, it was at least as interesting as daytime TV.) And one time, a conversation something along these lines took place: I eavesdropped a call with my scanner once in which an old woman was having a stroke in her garden and called someone for help. 
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Aug 2, 2022 20:05
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Note that cell service is still weirdly patchy and inconsistent in rural areas. My house has great Verizon coverage, but neither of the two cellphone companies that support my propane company's auto-refill gadgets.
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Aug 2, 2022 21:21
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Another fave cordless call: a friend of mine was dating a girl that lived nearby, and I overheard him talking to her one day. She put him on hold for awhile and he started muttering to himself, poo poo like "fuckin TBS...nobody watches you...TNT gently caress no...oh poo poo, Wapner...look the gently caress out..." and started beatboxing the People's Court theme music. Bet your rear end I rolled tape on that one
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Aug 2, 2022 21:45
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Note that cell service is still weirdly patchy and inconsistent in rural areas. My house has great Verizon coverage, but neither of the two cellphone companies that support my propane company's auto-refill gadgets. tbh I’m kind of losing my mind at seeing someone explain the concept of not having a cell phone signal and thus having to go somewhere else to get a signal like it’s a foreign concept now
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Aug 3, 2022 00:39
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Rev. Bleech_ posted:Another fave cordless call: a friend of mine was dating a girl that lived nearby, and I overheard him talking to her one day. She put him on hold for awhile and he started muttering to himself, poo poo like "fuckin TBS...nobody watches you...TNT gently caress no...oh poo poo, Wapner...look the gently caress out..." and started beatboxing the People's Court theme music. Bet your rear end I rolled tape on that one Is this your friend? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdU635esPpQ
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Aug 3, 2022 00:49
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Tiny Timbs posted:tbh I’m kind of losing my mind at seeing someone explain the concept of not having a cell phone signal and thus having to go somewhere else to get a signal like it’s a foreign concept now Around 2007 or so I remember having to explain to several people that just because your laptop has wi-fi, that doesn't mean it gets Internet everywhere you go. A few people just didn't understand why it would only work at certain places, because "it's wireless!" I finally got through by telling them to think of it more like a cordless phone instead of a cell phone. I doubt I could use that analogy today.
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Aug 3, 2022 01:09
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Tiny Timbs posted:tbh I’m kind of losing my mind at seeing someone explain the concept of not having a cell phone signal and thus having to go somewhere else to get a signal like it’s a foreign concept now I realize other than like long-haul truckers I seem to be the only person who has this problem (yes surely a dozen people reading this here are going to have similar stories)
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Aug 3, 2022 02:11
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I still have spots of lovely signal inside buildings sometimes. Home Depot went to a dynamic QR code in the app for military discount. Well the one I go to I often can’t get a good enough signal at checkout to get it to load a code, and have to walk out into the parking lot.
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Aug 3, 2022 02:26
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Dr. Quarex posted:Especially as someone who still loses service often enough in his life that I just resubscribed to SiriusXM because I am so annoyed with the 30 minutes driving in the general area of the Iowa/Wisconsin/Illinois border where my streaming can get through about 10 minutes of music It's not even a rural thing, even in well-developed areas it's not hard to find dead spots. For example, my office will probably show up as covered in a map for AT&T but the entire building and a few feet around it is a dead zone.
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Aug 3, 2022 03:06
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There used be one specific stretch of my commute through the middle of a city of a million people, on the highway, that if I were streaming music it would always start buffering during rush hour where I had to sit in this one stretch for a few minutes. My theory was that area was in between two towers whose coverage didn't *quite* overlap.
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Aug 3, 2022 03:16
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Extra fun cell weirdness: if your signal Is low enough on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan, you can often unintentionally pick up service from the Michigan side, despite it being like 90 miles away over water, which also has the fun bonus of shifting your clock forward an hour.
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Aug 3, 2022 03:28
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Tiny Timbs posted:It's not even a rural thing, even in well-developed areas it's not hard to find dead spots. For example, my office will probably show up as covered in a map for AT&T but the entire building and a few feet around it is a dead zone. At my house only Verizon has had consistently decent signal. T-Mobile only started getting a signal here about a year ago or so. AT&T didn't reach here last year. I'm well within city limits and all three providers have maps claiming I should be just fine here, but in reality my choice was Verizon or nothing most of the time I've lived here.
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Aug 3, 2022 03:32
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I am starting to think the cellular companies are not dedicated to providing the best possible service
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Aug 3, 2022 04:00
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Many jobs previous, I was responsible for the company cellphone plan. We had a bunch of people working close enough to the Canadian border that they would frequently get a signal without realizing it. It was common enough that our rep would strike the international voice/data charges with a quick email; no phone call with support and an hour on hold required.
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Aug 3, 2022 04:10
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There’s a PBS Frontline episode from 10 years about all the cell tower deaths the followed the iPhone’s launch. There was this huge push to expand data capabilities when they realized smartphones were going to be a big deal, and they didn’t really put much care into proper training of crews or making sure they were being safe. So what you got was a bunch of untrained guys climbing on towers, doing drugs at work, and falling off.
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Aug 3, 2022 04:17
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Pham Nuwen posted:Slow-scan TV is maybe my favorite part of ham radio. Basically, you put your callsign and a short text message on top of an image, then transmit it on one of the unofficial SSTV frequencies. If somebody receives you and likes/hates your image, they'll respond to you by putting your callsign and their own callsign on a different image and sending it back. This reminds me of an old CCTV technology. In the 1980's ADPRO developed a concept called Fastscan. It was streaming security camera footage over dial up. Images were 160 x 120, and it had a framerate you measure in minutes, not seconds. The tech is still around and used in some specialization situations. Resolution is NTSC or PAL and the framerate has improved I'm told.
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Aug 3, 2022 04:41
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Dr. Quarex posted:I am starting to think the cellular companies are not dedicated to providing the best possible service minimum viable product
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Aug 3, 2022 05:53
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:Extra fun cell weirdness: if your signal Is low enough on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan, you can often unintentionally pick up service from the Michigan side, despite it being like 90 miles away over water, which also has the fun bonus of shifting your clock forward an hour. I was in Friedrichshafen recently, it's on the German side of Lake Constance. As I was sitting at a cafe on the water, I was getting bounced to Austrian and Swiss cell towers constantly, it's only 5-15 km or so, though. Luckily the roaming agreement is uniform in the EU+EEC, otherwise that could have gotten expensive very quickly.
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Aug 3, 2022 06:35
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More Laserdiscs today! Some run of the mill movies for cheap to pad out my collection and fill some gaps:   And this weird movie I don't know anything about except being some sort of live-action little mermaid thing but Japanese so going to be weird. Comes with some records and was $2:  And Charcoal sketches of the cast (well most likely not real but looks the business): 
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Aug 3, 2022 09:06
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Re cell phone signal chat, it's one of the few times I actually take my radio for any purpose other than loving around with APRS or chilling out on a repeater; we go up to Lincoln, NH every so often, and signal can be spotty up there, especially if we go on the highway or over the Kankamangus highway.
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Aug 3, 2022 14:26
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humphreys you should look in to fixing beater pinball machines, seems like it'd scratch that itch you've got nicely. good mix of electromechanical and board work there
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Aug 3, 2022 15:19
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