[BC] Re: Who's a Ham?

[Patrick Griffith, N0NNK / WPE9HVW]

Pat Griffith, NØNNK / AG. Been licensed for ~15 years. Finally
upgraded from Technician to General a couple weeks ago.

Speaking of nostalgia (weren't we?) some of you might be interested to
know that I was the user of what may have been the first handheld
portable telephone in the country (provided by my employer) long before
cellular in 1972. It was a Motorola HT-200 "brick" custom made by the
factory with two-tone sequential alert decoding specifically for use on
the old VHF operator assisted Manual Telephone Service (MTS). Motorola
told us it was the first unit that they had produced for that specific
purpose. The receive audio was muted until the proper alert tone
sequence was received so that you didn't have to monitor the other
telephone conversations on the frequency. MTS was a dual-frequency
half-duplex system with the base transmitter operating in a continuous
duty cycle. During a telephone conversation it provided continuous audio
from the landline circuit and/or the operator. Between calls it
transmitted an idle tone to mark the frequency as an available channel
for roamers and to indicate that it was not active with a call. To make
a call from the mobile you got the operators attention by simply
transmitting "hello, operator" until they responded. You gave the
operator your unit number and the number you wanted. You heard a dial
tone connect, then heard the operator rotary dialing the number. The
mobile device operated in push-to-talk mode. The system we were on was
80 miles from Chicago and only had one channel. Therefore, only one call
at a time could be conducted within the system. It had a very high power
base station located on the tallest TV tower (WTVO) in the county.
Remote receivers located throughout the region were manually selectable
by the operator to obtain the best signal from the mobile. Coverage
exceeded a 75 mile radius of the transmitter and was only limited by the
mobile units ability to get a signal to one of the remote receivers. At
the time I thought that I was the king of mobile communications. Very
few people had access to mobile telephony. And to do so with a handheld
portable device was simply futuristic. Ah the good old days!

Patrick Griffith, CBT CBNT CRO
Westminster CO
http://community.webtv.net/AM-DXer/
http://community.webtv.net/N0NNK/