Batboard

In cleaning up my house recently, I found my old Motorola Ultra Classic (brick) cellular phone. If memory serves me right, I remember on the LMPS web pages a white two way portable, possibly for marine use, that was shaped and styled in a very siliar fashion to the old Ultra Classic. Does ayone remember if this product indeed existed, and if so, could one make use of it today? Also, besides for making an interesting conversation piece, what can I do with my old Ultra Classic?
Sorry if these questions seem elementary, I'm quite new to this.

Thank you in advance,
Mark

I found out that the model that I was talking about is the PFD 3000.

I seen one of them 8 years ago in Darwin Australia it was for the 800mhz trunking (smart net)

its a 3 watt full duplex radio........basically a prehistoric cell phone that operates on Trunking systems only as a phone....or a radio if programmed to be both....Its based on a the ultra classic platform its just instead of doing AMPS it does smartnet. ITS what NEXTEL has evolved into...just with nextel you pay cell phone airtime prices prices instead of radio prices because everybody is used to a cell phone being associated with 60$ a month bill....Hey did anybody think this wouldn't be half bad on a Local SMR! Maybe Ill get one or a fleet of 6 with a gang charger and pay less than for 2 Nextel's! I wonder if you could put the smartnet format into an old Analog StarTAC and run that little bad boy full-duplex....Id definiely take that over an i1000 anyday....hell.....Id sell them in the ghetto and charge people cheap airtime....too bad it would only work in and around a county...who knows?

Hello.

The thing was listed as a "privacy plus" unit, it runs around 2 watts.

I asked if the unit I had at one time could do smartnet and was told it was type I only, there could be later models.

It does indeed use the "brick" battery and CVC.

Thank You.

Hello.

Did some checking, the ultra classic, as well as the business classic, both dual NAM, share the same uP as the privacy plus STX.

The early startacs have the same CPU in a new, smaller, package.

The EE2 and EE3 'phones departed fully from the shared design.

The standard of AMPS is nothing more than very advanced trunking, it will support half-duplex, remember, it was the logical extension of IMTS.
Motorola offered a 'phone that used one handset, and both a 3 wire cellular (AMPS) and a pulsar (IMTS), this allowed "full coverage", I was surprised to find the software support for this dual operation is still in some 'phones, right up to the ST7797 startac!.
Diplexers are fixed tuned in the startac, AMPS is 30 KHz spacing, and the operating band is a bit different, but same 45 MHz split.
So, it just might be possible to make an early startac do SMR, as well as take a privacy plus radio and do AMPS.
The cellular system was 999 channels to begin with, 666 channels split between "A", the non-wireline carrier, and "B" the wireline carrier, and "C" government use.
Now there are 832 public channels and 167 government channels, if you look at a chart for AMPS 832, you will see the missing channel numbers as a gap, however, if you go into long "testmode" programming of a AMPS moto' 'phone, you can enable "private system extended channels".
All government systems have 21 control channels assigned, even if there is only 21 channels in the system, but remember, a control channel can switch to call processing, my guess, legacy support,
Government systems also do what is called wide area operation, this is where there is one channel on high power, system wide, and the other towers RX only, perhaps aircraft use only as this is all I have ever hear on this mode.

Thank You.

Hey man that is amazing information.....I have a star tac that we can use to do research on this project...its like new...I would love to connect in to do 800 in privacy plus or Smartnet...whatever...as long as we can build a cheap system around it to test it on.....Like old 800 trunking equip.. Does anybody wanna work on this with me? Especially whoever that was that just replied to me. Also...are you saying the government own private systems all over the country that are AMPS? I would love to get a cell phone company to entice the government to give them service for more area and cheaper than it is for them to maintain the system.......Get the goverment to sell us the system (and most of the channels )...hopfully in major markets, and get old analog Motorola phones to sell for emergency purposes...people with bad credit..."Disposible" phones that are coming out (made of paper..you just throw them away when the minutes are done)cheap airtime for the consumer or person that wants a hands off approach..only problem is with cloning. Anybody have any business connections and make this a venture....if everybody on batlabs helps out, we might become the batlabs billionaires...all us radio geeks sittin on top.

An interesting point - You said that it could be used in emergencies. I know that after a certain point in time, the FCC declared that any cellular phone with or without current service contract must be able to call 911. So that wouldn't be the best case in the world to support that.

My guess is that It would be pretty hard to get access to that system. I know of one HAM repeater in Boston which is up on top of the federal reserve building, and they aren't allowed to have a phone line to use as a control point for it, they have to use cellular... They are probably pretty picky about whose on it, and rightfully so.

However, I've personally been quite curious to play with trunking stuff, just to see what you can do, and how to setup a system. I know some of the basic concepts, but at the same time, there's no ham space in the 800mhz band, and it's prob. too hard to program the 900mhz stuff down to the ham band. Sounds like something cool to play with, just not worth the $ for goofing around with it.

-Alex

Hello.

900 MHz "stuff" is put in/on the ham bands quite easily.
The quasi-cellular system run by the government will get you into something called AutoVon, not normal Public Switched Telephone Network, The FCC in no way regulates the federal system, this is done by something called the Joint Radio Commission, got the manual on the system from them.
" FTS2000 is the replacement for the now dated, JTTS, the 16 button kaysets have been replaced, the system is ,,,,,,.
This manual is boredom deluxe, however, it does have a nifty section on programming GE and motorola cellular telephones, this is done in long " *55 " programming mode.
This can also be accessed by FCN 00##testmode STO.
Have fun, but stay out of trouble, the feds tend to get pissed.