The bag phone still lives...

[sportsvoice]

Apparently you can still get a Motorola bag phone these days.

Motorola M900

I wish that analog bag phones still worked, there are too many gyms out there that don't have phone lines and cell remotes on digital phones sound like crap.

[Cameron]

The oil and gas industry insisted on keeping high-power bag phones.
Our group has one for those "Out Wayne" type remotes.
Analog JUST got turned off in this market.
Even though it's digital, 3 watts vs. a few milliwatts gets the job done.
I bet you never thought there would be a bag phone that ran on AC, DC, or had Bluetooth.

[cgarison]

Even though it's digital, 3 watts vs. a few milliwatts gets the job done.

Wow! That could really reach out and grab a tower. 3 watts digital would be much better than the 18 -24 watts analog that I pushed in 1999 when working in the coal fields.

[sportsvoice]

The oil and gas industry insisted on keeping high-power bag phones.
Our group has one for those "Out Wayne" type remotes.
Analog JUST got turned off in this market.
Even though it's digital, 3 watts vs. a few milliwatts gets the job done.
I bet you never thought there would be a bag phone that ran on AC, DC, or had Bluetooth.

I found one on FleaBay for my sports kit. Some of these high school gyms seem to make good Faraday cages as well. Those are also the ones that either have no phone lines nearby or have some sort of VoIP phone system that won't play nice with my sports mixer. (It needs a POTS line or can use a handset connection, but you hit the cat-5 distance limit when trying to run enough cable to bring the VoIP phone from its location out to the scorer's table.)

A tip for the M900 and remote gear -- mine wouldn't play nice with the JK Audio "Daptor One" at first. Ohming out the Daptor One came in at 1k tip-sleeve, while the Motorola privacy handset ohms out at 1.7k. I replaced R6 (was 1k resistor) inside the Daptor One with a 1.5k resistor and all is well now. Apparently the required mic impedance on the phone's handset port was > 1k, otherwise it thought the push-to-talk button on the handsfree device was being pressed.

I was having an issue on Saturday's basketball game with being handed off to a tower that had 1 bar signal vs. 5 bars (full scale) signal. I guess I was on a cell boundary. If you dig deep into the menus (at least on the GSM phone, you probably cannot do this on CDMA due to how it works), you can force network selection to manual and then lock the phone to a certain site by cell ID.

Probably having a Yagi for this thing instead of the long mag-mount whip that I do have would help with weak signal areas.

[sportsvoice]

Even though it's digital, 3 watts vs. a few milliwatts gets the job done.

Wow! That could really reach out and grab a tower. 3 watts digital would be much better than the 18 -24 watts analog that I pushed in 1999 when working in the coal fields.

I think the only catch would be that there is a hard distance limit for cell size on GSM. I think it's 22 miles. The reason is that the time-slotting scheme can't compensate for the propagation delay beyond that distance.