Boom cars (ot for sure...)

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Thu Jun 21 22:12:06 2001

At 08:33 PM 6/21/01 -0600, you wrote:
>Now of course, to be perfectly hypocritical, I'd LOVE to get my hands on
>a transmitter that convinces celphones it's the closest cell, effectively
>disabling every phone in range. Do I need to say this would be car mounted?

This is a True Story(tm) although it sounds like an urban legend (Fred I
can provide dates and GPS co-ordinates if you like ;-) A surplus place in
LA (timeline) was selling Motorola Cell Tranceivers. These are the things
that go on a cell tower and connect a cell phone to the switch on the
tower. This was an as-is where-is possibly good for parts deal and we
wanted to scavenge the nice RF coaxial connectors etc. Anyway, for grins
and giggles we applied power (24V DC for some reason) to see what if
anything would smoke. Nothing exciting, some clicks (relays going active)
some blinking lights off and on, then nothing. Then the bar LED labelled
"call traffic" gets one bar, two, then six. Then the error/fault light
comes on :-)

The theory is that this thing powered up, then started trying to handle
cell phones but had no switch to connect them to and failed out the calls.
I didn't have an analog 800Mhz phone at the time to try it out so I can't
say for sure, but we thought it neat anyway.

--Chuck
Received on Thu Jun 21 2001 - 22:12:06 BST