Verizon made me "Fumey" too - It's a shame. Been with them since Bell Atlantic/ Bell Mobile (1987). The "Bag Lady" used to come to our office in Chesterbrook at the corp center and we'd gather around to see the latest Car Phones then Bag phones.
I remember asking her about these "new" fangled free standing phones you can put in your pocket and she said, "They'll never go anywhere, No Voltage. Can't get reception. Your car phone is like 4 volts and these things are like 1/32nd of a volt"......
Well, she was obviously very wrong on many counts, not the least of which was that they'll never catch on (lol)! OMG, could you imagine if there were still only car and bag phones? We'd still see phone booths, another death due to cell phones.
To clarify for everyone, she was mostly wrong regarding the 'volts' comment. She was only nearly right in the values she mentioned. Cell phones, when first introduced for cars communicated with 5 watts (not volts), of transmission power. This was the case for all car phones and also continued into the so-called 'bag-phones'. The original car phones were powered with the car's own 12 volt systems (actually 13.8 volt lead-acid batteries), and which have far more available current (amps), than these phones (radios), could ever need.
When the transition to bag-phones was made, they were simply full car phone installation kits with full sized handsets, cradles for the handset to snap into, and fold-out car phone antennas packed into a shoulder pack, and with a smaller 'gel-cell' 12 volt lead-acid battery to supply the necessary power as required by these high power car installation phone systems. So even the bag-phones were full 5 watt transmission powered systems.
At that time, cellular towers were few and far between and so the car phones required large externally mounted antennas, either mounted on the front or rear windshield or on fixed (non opening), side widows, or mounted onto the meal of the fenders or roof of the car. The car phone's also therefore required higher transmission power to reach these distant antenna towers so that the signal could be kept strong and so the calls could hopefully not be interrupted. This was a big problem in more rural areas, where hills and valleys, as well as other natural and man-made obstructions created 'dead zones'. These early phones were analog, so as the signal was strong the audio was crisp and clear, but as the signal weakened the sound was overcome by static and eventually the calls often ended abruptly (Can you hear me now?).
When the first totally portable hand held phones were introduced, the Motorola 8000X they were reduced power as compared to the car installs and bag-phones, I think they were 2 watts, but still much more powerful than cell phones of today. They were large, frequently compared to the size of the common building brick (hence the nickname 'brick-phone'), weighed nearly 2 pounds, took 10 hours to charge and provided talk times of only 30 minutes, with less talk time the longer the phone was on stand by. The cellular network was growing and so there were more towers but they were still very sparse by today's standards. Let's not forget they only made and received voice phone calls.
By contrast today, cellular towers are everywhere, multiple carriers and shared towers, and so since they are much more relatively close to the user the phone's now operate at much lower power, which therefore reduces the size needed for the battery and means they can be much smaller. Today smartphones are operating at a maximum 300 milliwatts though most often output much less, with as low as 100 milliwatts. This range of power is only 6% of the early car phone's power output at its highest, and as little as 2% at its lowest. This has not only reduced the battery size but also the transmitters, antenna and overall package size to the slim, almost totally screen phones of today.
The young of today just don't know how good they have it. They can thank Motorola's Martin Cooper and the rest of the team for developing these amazing devices through the work they did for the military, which opened up the industry for what we have today.
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