Pre-cellular car phones

[astro]

I was reading a novel by Larry McMurtry called Cadillac Jack set in the 70's where the main character has a pre-cellular car phone that apparently works seamlessly from coast to coast. How did these phones work? Was there a special nationwide network just for them? Any information appreciated.

[DaveW]

First "car phone" I ever saw was a part of a Ham radio rig. This was back in the 1970's. Get in touch with an operator via the radio, the operator flips some switches on his/her end, the guy in the car flips a switch or two, and could then dial as if on a land line. The per-minute cost was extreme, but this guy (my best friend's dad) was a Ham fanatic, so he had to have it.

A few years later, probably 1981, my dad explained to me how these new "cellular phones" worked, and thought it would get to be a Big Thing. I think he underestimated.

[Sultan Kinkari]

When I was commercial fishing in Alaska fishermen would make important phone calls while out at sea via the "sea phone", using a radio to access the marine operator. I assume it has probably been around since before the sixties and very well might be used today by boats that are not equipped with satellite phones or are out of cell range.

[CnoteChris]

I thought it always worked like a regular CB, except that it was through a telephone handset, rather than the typical CB unit we're all accustomed to.

To put it simply, they turned the seperate CB unit, with the different microphone and speaker set-up, and combined it into a hand-held unit with the microphone and speaker a configured like a regular old 'telephone'. If I remember right, the hand-held 'phone' set-up, or conversion, came complete with a 'send' type trigger thingy seen on the CB set up.

What you radiod into, was, a base, or system, that essentially tied you into the phone system.

The only reason I'm partly answering this question is that I saw a politician type dude (I honestly don't remember what he did, I was young, but it was something in the higher echelons of politics around the late seventies) using the thing and I asked him about it.

He talked to me as a kid, but was detailed enough to get across to me that it was a walkie-talkie on his end, and was a telephone on the other, with a machine thing in between.

[Popup]

In the first part of the last century Lars Magnus Ericsson (the founder of 'Telefonaktiebolaget Ericsson', later the famous Ericsson-with-the-three-sausages (look at their logo) ) was out driving on the Swedish countryside. The first telephone poles were spreading over the country, and he thought that it was a shame that even though he was driving alongside a phone line, he could not use it. So, he got out two long poles with hooks, and hooked them on the overhead wires, and connected a telephone. And voila, the first car phone! No need for a radio, arials, or even power supply!

If you are interested in early mobile phones, look into the early Swedish systems MTA, MTB and MTC (all in the 1950s-1960s).
quoting from http://www.teliamobile.se/articles/00/00/1f/f5/01/ :

Their first system was called MTA and by 1950, Lauhrén was able to place a call to the talking clock from his car.

[TheLoadedDog]

My grandfather called my mother from a car phone for her twenty-first birthday in Sydney in 1956. He was a senior manager in the (then) government telecommunications monopoly, so he had access to such toys. I'm not sure what the technology was.

I also remember seeing an episode of the British action show "The Professionals" circa 1980, which featured a car phone comprised of a large box sitting in the middle of the back seat and a large dog-bone style receiver (the same as on 70s landline phones).

[Shadowfyre]

Well, strictly speaking, todays cell phones are essentially walkie talkies that don't require the user to press the button to talk. Some may have noticed in the movie, Saving Private Ryan, that Tom Hanks uses the phone strapped to the one guy's back. It's just a fancy radio.

Everything I've been taught is that Bell Labs was the first to go commercial with a "mobile phone" in the Cbicagoland area. This consisted of one antenna with a very high power that served all the users, of which there weren't that many (you had to have pretty good political connections to get one) because of bandwidth restrictions. In order for the antenna to "see" a phone far away, the phone needed a big power boost which was provided by the car's battery and the antenna was attached to the car. How this differed from anything else is that it had an automatic connection to the land based phone lines.

To accomodate more users, they started putting up more antennae and using different channels. The geographical area serviced by a single antenna became known as a cell and were designed to handle users moving between cells.

I am unaware of any phones that could work seemlessly from coast to coast prior to the cellular system we have now. I expect it may have been a CB radio that an operator was able to patch into a local exchange. As the CB moved out of the range of the antenna, the user would have to end the call and ask the operator of the next antenna to setup the call again.

[CnoteChris]

Originally posted by Shadowfyre
Everything I've been taught is that Bell Labs was the first to go commercial with a "mobile phone" in the Cbicagoland area.

I'm sorry, you're breaking up on me there. What was that?


*Uh oh. I'm in one of those moods today.

[SirRay]

There's a scene in 'The Love Bug' (1969) when the villian (well, meanie) Peter Thorndyke[?] makes a call from his car.
He picks up the reciever and says something along the lines of 'Operator, this is Mobile XXXXXX [whatever letter code he actually did say]', so from that it seems like the mobile phone system was based on Ham Radio.

[frankhoma]

Before cellular, telephone companies provided mobile telephone service with a system called IMTS. It worked, but there were not enough towers to be able to use them coast to coast seamlessly. There were also very few channels in this system and so even if you were near a tower you couldn't necessarily make a call. It was also very expensive for both the hardware and the service. The one advantage they had over today's cellular was that all of the telephone companies worked together to provide the service (pre AT&T divestiture), so you didn't have to worry about whether the signal in the area was from your particular service provider.

[Markxxx]

On the I Love Lucy show, when they took the trip to Europe. Ricky tells his mother in law she can call him on the boat by asking the operator for the mobile operator (but then says don't call it's to 'spensive --laughs galore)

[elmwood]

Is IMTS completely abandoned? The frequencies IMTS used are still allocated to the service. I would imagine that there would be a few die-hards out there somewhere, just like there are folks living in urban areas who are still using large analog brick and bag cell phones.

[astro]

Thanks to frankhoma's pointer I found this info

IMTS AND MTS info

"1.1.1 Mobile Teleph ne Service (MTS)
In 1946, Bell Telephone Labs inaugurated the first mobile system for the public, in St. Louis. This system was known as Mobile Telephone Service (MTS). Keep in mind that at this time AT&T still owned and operated the majority of the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Three channels in the range of 150 MHz were put into service,operating at frequencies between 35 and 44 MHz. An MTS highway system to serve the corridor between Boston and New York began operating in 1947. MTS transmissions (from radio towers) were designed to cover a very large area,using high-power radio transmitters. Often the towers were placed at geographically high locations. Because they served a large area, they were subject to noise, interference, and signal blocking.
MTS was a half-duplex, “push-to-talk ” system; therefore MTS offered communications that were only one way at a time. An operator was needed to connect a customer to the landline local exchange carrier (LEC)network.

In 1949 the FCC authorized non-wireline companies known as radio common carriers (RCCs)to provide MTS. An RCC is a wireless carrier that is not affiliated with a local telephone company. Prior to 1949, all mobile service was supplied by the wireline telephone companies. This marked the birth of competition in the telecommunications industry.


1.1.2 Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS)
In 1965, almost 20 years after the introduction of MTS, the Bell System introduced Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS), the successor system to MTS. IMTS was the first automatic mobile system: it was a full-duplex system, eliminating the push-to-talk requirement of the older MTS system. IMTS allowed simultaneous two-way conversations. A key IMTS advantage was that users could dial directly into the PSTN. IMTS narrowed the channel bandwidth, which increased the number of frequencies allowed. Because the cell site locations were high-output- power stations, one radio location could serve an entire city.
Between the landline phone company and the RCC, nineteen 30-kHz channels were authorized in the 30-to 300-MHz band, which is the VHF band. The FCC also authorized twenty-six 25-kHz channels in the 450- MHz band (the UHF band). With full-duplex systems such as IMTS, two radio channels are needed for each conversation: one channel to transmit and one channel to receive.

As with MTS, IMTS radio towers were still installed in high places (e.g., tall buildings), and the system was still designed to cover large geographic areas, up to 50 mi in diameter. Because of limited capacity, eventually IMTS operators prohibited roaming in their markets. Roaming refers to placing calls in markets other than a user's home market. Roaming will be discussed in a later section.

Trivia: The IMTS system was designed so that only 50% of the calls were completed during the busy hour. Service was often poorer than that in some metropolitan areas. This was a result of the fact that very few radio channels existed for IMTS service."

etc etc

[Popup]

Originally posted by Shadowfyre
Well, strictly speaking, todays cell phones are essentially walkie talkies that don't require the user to press the button to talk.

I beg to disagree. walkie-talkies are direct point-to-point portable radios, whereas portable telephones admittedly use radio, but in all cases use a base station to route the calls.

[Shadowfyre]

I beg to disagree. walkie-talkies are direct point-to-point portable radios, whereas portable telephones admittedly use radio, but in all cases use a base station to route the calls.

Alright, you caught me. I goofed. Sorry. I was attempting to simplify and I guess I over-simplified. Though even some of the two-way radios now use base stations to route communications as well, e.g. Nextel phones and large city police and fire departments.

[KneadToKnow]

I still remember the way Mentor used to pick up the handset and say "Mo-BILE operator?"