I'm not in the market and clicked the link out of curiosity, but yes, I can turn my android phone into a hair dryer if it takes $35 of auxilary equipement.
I'd love to see that actually... Most hair driers are very power hungry. 2kW is not uncommon (at least here where standard voltage is 240V). Achieving substantial amount of drying from a mobile phone battery would be quite a feat of engineering.
Make a small rechargable hair drier for camping/use where outlets are in short supply, and you've got yourself a saleable product, even it it only gives about 5 min of hot air.
I agree that it is an interesting configuration, but I also agree that it is click bait.
The clickbait part is the "Turn your Android phone" bit. Of course you can turn your Android phone into <x>, where <x> is a USB-powered device, for approximately the price of <X>.
Such a thing is clearly possible - various debug and calibration modes for these modems make them output the raw I/Q values needed for a software defined radio.
Unfortunately, in a locked down production phone, those modes are unavailable.
I wish this was for sale assembled. I know probably about 50% about printing PCBs compared to what I’d need to know, don’t have a 3D printer, and I expect that the firmware and apps probably have at least one or two quirks to take into account. All together, this makes it a big difference in accessibility between being able to buy an assembled item and tinkering oneself. I know tinkering is fun for many people, but having a mobile ham is fun for many more.
P.S. Upon second glance, it looks like I’d need soldering skills, too. These things really add to the price. The price of components may be $35, but the cost of learning all these things (time) and mistakes along the way may be in the thousands if we take the hourly rate of a tech worker. Flawed comparison, I know, but you get the point.
It's...not that hard. Unless we're dealing with SMDs, soldering takes about a weekend to learn correctly. Most DIY kits involve through-hole components that you can master after you take a cheap iron to a couple dozen header pins or something equally banal. SMDs, on the other hand, take a bit more finesse, but can be achieved with a wee bit of time and patience.
I work in industrial controls and it blows my mind how many people in the field are terrified of soldering, even something as simple as tinning wires so the crimps fit a bit better, let alone the amount of "DIYers" I meet that don't even own an iron. Y'all are holding yourself back by not learning this easy-to-grasp skill.
SMDs are not that bad, I always design my boards with SMD components, though I never put smaller than 0805. The chips are even easier to solder once they are fixed at two or three points. I totally abandoned THT elements once I felt confident with surface mounts. I'm doing this with an iron tip, so no BGAs for now (until I turn old toaster oven into a PCB oven).
how the turntables. Back in the 80s my grandfather (N4MDB RIP) had a ham radio in his car and used something called an "autopatch" which could dial phone numbers. He'd call my grandma and say we were going shopping or whatever. Everybody from the shack could listen in with their radios.
He tried to get me interested in ham radio but at the time I was exploring the internet and ham seemed... boring? Overly fussy with its technical license and morse code? He did give me a shortwave radio and explain how radio waves could bounce off the atmosphere (which seemed like science fiction honestly) and I got to listen to numbers stations.
Yeah those "autopatch" devices were illegal - Ma Bell had rules against connecting any radio to the telephone system. Probably worried about long distance revenue.
The portable radios/cord free telephones back then were a bit of a legal gray-zone.
This is a wacky idea, but the "modern" thing to do would be to repurpose seldom used 2-meter repeaters and make them 5G gNBs in the 3300 to 3450 MHz ham band (which overlaps NR band 78). Then you could directly use your cell phone (with a different SIM card) as your ham radio.
Network gaming servers to the gNBs and every kid in the US will want a ham license.
I went down this rabbit hole for a while a few years ago. I think it's doable, but I don't have good answers to a few questions:
1. How do you get cell phones to automatically identify in a way that satisfies the part 97 rules?
2. How compatible are modern smartphones with the null encryption cypher?
3. With fewer and fewer physical sim slots, is it possible for an amateur to produce valid eSIMs? (And is it possible without internet access, such that you could onboard new users during an internet outage?)
As other commenters mentioned, you need a core network too, which means you probably also need an 802.11-based backend network like HamWAN or AREDN plus some servers.
1.- You get a "nice PLMN" for the network and assign phone numbers (and manage key material) only after Ham Identification. DMR Style (at least here in Spain)
2.- Most of them will refuse to join any Private SA network that does not use SUCI and encryption (in my experience). If you have a "nice" PLMN, they will connect. What a "nice" PLMN is varies between modems, the testing PLMN is a safe bet :)
3.- Also gone down this rabbit hole. eSIMs must be signed by a GSMA authorized key, and they are picky. Osmocom people have relationship with someone that signs profiles for them (for pay). The crypto is quite straight forward to do offline, eSIM profile distribution not so much. Key propagation from generator to core network and final client (ue) would also be a challenge. Another option is using the testing certificate, it should remain active in most modems for certain PLMNs. I have yet to test this, but work gets in the way
There is a variety of open software and COTS hardware that could fully power this network. The client side is the hardest part, especially if you want a phone.
PC modems on a Linux machine are more manageable (But expensive, let's wait a few iterations on RedCap maybe). And SIMs with ADM keys can be purchased from different sources
I would love to set up a real managed digital network for hams, with stuff like roaming and the like.
But I'd be more interested in technologies that are one to many rather than the one to one calls on mobile phones. Open public channels keeps the ham community connected.
Something like DMR Tier 3 or Tetra would be great.
You also need a 5G core to make that work. Also probably an IMS to actually provide some services on top of that. You also need to rip out all the encryption for the ham bands.
You could always somehow make the vibration motor a "movement feature", and call the phone a "remotely controlled vehicle"
;-)
Chatgpt- Yes, using the vibration motor to make small position changes on a remotely controlled vehicle would fall under the category of controlling the vehicle. If you encrypt the control signals that dictate when and how the vibration motor activates to achieve those position changes, it would be allowed under the FCC rules for encryption related to remote vehicle control.
Since these encrypted signals would only be used for the vehicle's movement or positioning, this approach aligns with the regulations permitting encryption for controlling remote vehicles. Just ensure that any non-control communications remain unencrypted to fully comply with ham radio rules.
In remote areas with group of people, I have an idea where all phones could linkup like those tesla cars in a mesh-network fashion and then all of them become a loudspeaker.
I used to ask the same thing back when car stereos were all the rage --- I wondered why I couldn't get shortwave or SSB or Air/VHF reception and the answer lies in use-case. Yeah, you and I might eat up this super niche product, but the market on the whole would not.
Just look at what electric car makers are doing with AM radio. They're saying "screw RFI problems, we'll not filter those and just remove AM reception from the car radio because who needs that?" The answer is a larger slice of the population than would want other radio services.
Even Apple never enabled the FM receiver feature on their chips from Qualcomm. It's all about the time spend designing it, ensuring it doesn't cause issues with must-have features, is intuitive to access/use, _and_ aligns with buyer demands.
With ham radio making up less than 1% of most countries' populations, the need just isn't there. (Most folks you talk to are doing good just to even be aware of ham radio, let alone actually be a ham.)
Yes, but think about having a mobile that has native integration with APRS or can make voice/packet radio or even DMR. It would be perfect for hiking or adventures.
Even better with LORA.
I wish they would get LTE/5G peer to peer working. It is defined in spec but barely anything supports it. Then could do any networking instead of limited to ham radio.
forgive my ignorance here please, but I've read about APRS on and off for a few years and always wondered what I'd need to just transmit some data that would eventually make it's way to the internet. I recently suggested it to a Ornithologist friend doing back country research in South Afrika too.
But why are there no regularly recommended cheap hardware solutions that can do this (and or just hobbyist builds using an RPI). Seems like the demand would be there but perhaps I'm just not understand all thats involved.
Any insight you could provide would be appreciated.
APRS is actually pretty simple protocol. Data is encoded by modulating tones in a human's hearing spectrum, so if you tuned into the APRS frequency with any-purpose scanner (like most Baofengs), you would hear your childhood if you are old enough to remember 52k modems. The sound wave is easy to decode and encode with software. There are plenty of programs (Linux even has dedicated kernel modules) which turn your sound card into a modem, and the missing piece is the radio.
Now, there are different approaches. If your goal is to receive only, you can plug the headphone output of the cheapest Baofeng scanner into the microphone input of your PC, run the software, and you will start seeing messages soon. If you want to transmit, you do the opposite, but you must somehow automatically enable transmission on the radio when the program wants to transmit; there are different methods of doing so, depending on the radio. Basically, you can use anything what can receive and/or transmit audio on 2m bands. Such devices are cheap and easy to buy, so people probably don't bother with assembling a dedicated hardware. Just plug it to the computer.
They exist but they are no-name brands. The phone is crappy, the radio is crappy, and the combo is a big brick. It would be awkward phone with antenna sticking out.
The question is why don't handheld radios have Bluetooth and USB-C data (some have USB-C power).
The common workaround for FM radio was to use the wired earphones plugged into the phone as an antenna. But FM radio is usually extremely, unbelievably strong (a lot of hams know that), so YMMV for other bands with much lower power signals.
The Ulefone Armor 26 is available with a built-in UHF/VHF transceiver, but the software isn't great.
The opposite trend is radically changing business radio - a lot of devices that look like VHF/UHF transceivers are just cellphones. There just aren't a lot of environments where VHF repeaters provide more reliable coverage than LTE & WiFi.
I know very little about antenna technology, but physics might play a role. 2m/70cm is pretty far away from the few-cm-wavelengths of somewhat modern cellphones (70cm a bit less so). For FM radio, the common workaround was to use the cable of plugged in wired earphones as antenna, but I don't know how well that would work for bands where the transmitters aren't as unbelievably strong as they are for FM radio.
And then there's of course the fact that almost nobody is asking for that, so the engineering and maintenance effort behind it would be insane in comparison.
I recently dug up my old iPod Nano 5th gen (small square one) from 2010 and charged it up, and still works fine.
What I forgot, and it totally surprised me, is that it has FM radio! I selected some stations and it worked great. And that Nano was tiny, would be cool to have this feature back in current iPhones / Apple Watches. I know it’s not the same as having full tx/rx on the 2m/70cm bands, but still, even just just listening to normal radio on iPhone would be cool.
> And that Nano was tiny, would be cool to have this feature back in current iPhones / Apple Watches.
That iPod used its headphone cables as the radio antenna. There's no easy way around that for a SmartWatch, and most people wouldn't be happy to carry a USB-C antenna dongle around with them for their iPhone.
You can of course start doing black RF magic with more compact antenna designs, but that's much more complex and still has a much larger footprint on the board than the FM receiver in that iPod nano has.
I remember that my HTC Desire Z Android phone, and possible also the iteration of a Nexus Android phone that I later owned, had FM Radio. It was relatively common back then, and I made use of it almost every day on my bike commute and such.
They used the (wired) earphones plugged into them as an FM antenna, worked well enough.
I recently found my old e-reader (Kindle Keyboard) from 2011 and the first thing I had to do was swap a new battery in, the old one would not hold a charge for too long.
Anyone that has a real need for something like that is either using either very specialized (and expensive) hardware, or some peripheral solution like TFA. We already have general purpose, mass produced devices that benefit from huge scale, and there's no such scale in amateur radio.
http://www.mobilinkd.com/ is probably the closest pre-existing thing that is similar. I don't think this was lack of imagination, modules like the DRA818V make building a fully integrated unit a lot easier these days
I had so much fun operating APRS through the space station with a car 2 meter radio and a moderate mast antenna in a terribly hilly spot but be able to see stations in the South Atlantic and Midwest states. Also the time I was on a 2 meter HT walking in the woods and heard the astronauts talking to hams. And the time the computer told me it was just about to be visible and went outdoors and the ISS was huge and bright, more an airliner than an asterism.
There are combination PoC (push-to-talk over cellular) + WiFi + VHF/UHF radios.
I think the problem as it relates to HAM radio as a hobby, is that if you have cell signal and cell phone, usually any other radio is less effective.
So while it is nice to use the interface/battery/CPU of a cell phone to drive a radio, it's superfluous if you have a cell signal. If you don't have a cell signal, usually having 5W for analog voice in an HT is much more important than having a special interface or digital modes.
As long as the end user assembles 51% of it, you don't need it. You self-attest that the device is in compliance. You also have to perform an "RF study" but there is no requirement for documentation on that.
Don't have my license yet, but for me it's definitely building homebrew (i.e. designed by me) transceivers. Not actually that interested in talking to other hams except for then testing my gear.
Heh, I'm not that interested in talking, but I am interested in typing. Especially with the advantage of advanced math/error correction, store and forward, relaying, and related. This adds up to a few watts in a $100 radio getting across a country.
Not sure if you mean building or designing and building. But QRP labs has some nice kits.
I'd recommend something like a couple $25 Quansheng radios instead. More reliability, more range, less finicky, more durable and about the same size as this add-on.
(For some reason the radios are showing as $30 right now)
Yeah I have 4 that are great 2m/70cm, which is what the included antennas are optimized for. Even better with a cheap Nagoya antenna and non-stock firmware.
Unfortunately people don’t realize that even if you install a firmware that allows down to 11m, even connected to a $1200 base antenna the power output will be in the milliwatt range while throwing off on harmonics.
There’s also the case of hardware inconsistency and fakes. When I hook up 4 of the included antennas to my VNA there’s pretty big variance, and I recently tested a fake Nagoya that was clearly tuned for air band and not 70cm/2m as advertised.
The Qansheng's that I've tested have been fine, first harmonic down 44dB, which is OK for the FCC.
However, if you hack the firmware and transmit outside the bands the radio's RF is designed to transmit on, then you will probably see all sorts of spectral weirdness.
Another issue is people were “testing” them using an RTLSDR which very easily gets overloaded and shows harmonics where there are none. Even my local FM station shows up on my SDR at frequencies I know they’re not actually transmitting on.
I think it's poor practice for the seller to advertise those simply as a "Walkie Talkie," as that Amazon link does, without making it clear that it is an amateur radio transceiver that requires a license with an FCC-issued call sign to operate. I wonder how many people buy a pair of those and then just start transmitting without quite knowing what they are doing.
Might want to consider the meshtastic, something like a lilygo t-echo. A few advantages over the standard ham radio:
* Nodes automatically forms a mesh
* works with any android/IOS widget, simple text message like interface
* store and forward means all nodes don't have to be online at the same time.
* Cheap, no soldering, and no ham license required.
* Can use phones GPS, makes it easy to track other nodes
* Don't have to program in repeaters, every node can repeat.
Meshtastic(Lora) also doesn't require a license since it's in the ISM bands.
Lora also has really good FEC and other things that make it work incredibly well(at the cost of throughput). Honestly I wish we saw more things like that in the ham bands(other than FT8).
There's a couple Lora radios out there that are USB serial based and can be controlled with AT commands that would let you so something similar if you want to build up from scratch.
This isn't true, it is not exclusive to the ISM bands. You can run it on any band you choose so long as you have a license to do so. Case in point: the ham bands
Sure, that's "technically" correct but most usage of Lora is going to be in ISM since that's where they are traditionally deployed. That doesn't require a license which can be a hurdle if you don't already have one.
I've got a ham license so not a big deal for me but for those wanting to try radios without a huge investment a pair of $20 Lora AT serial radios are a great way to dip into digital radio.
Note that various ham bands have limitations on what types of emissions are allowed. For example some only allow RTTY and data, so no phone or image. And some allow phone or image but no data. Even if the type of information is allowed there might be technical restrictions prohibiting some forms of modulation.
So before using something that was designed depending on some non-ham part of the regulations for its legality, such as part 18 (ISM) in the US, on a ham band I'd want to look into the details and make sure it is not doing something under that part but not allowed under the ham regulations.
Also, the ham bands as a whole cannot be used for profit-motives or any financial gain. People often forget this rule. Not to mention the (kind of absurd, IMO) rule against any form of encryption.
In the US, there certainly is. The rule doesn't mention encryption specifically, it just prohibits "encoding for the purpose of obscuring meaning". The intent is what matters not the method.
Decent walkie-talkies are cheap. Cheap enough that I bought some for my kids to play with instead of a single channel garbage radio like I had as a kid. If you really want a cheap programmable radio Yaesu and BaoFeng are the brands most people go with.
> This would be amazing for backcountry communication
At 1W, you'd be better served with little FRS/GMRS radios. Better still, for less than the cost of building this yourself, you can buy ready-made a Baofeng UV-5R for under $20. The antenna is a little crummy, but you can buy that and _still_ be under the $30 build price. Further, the Baofeng isn't supporting a whole operating system so the battery will last much longer. I wouldn't want my "always-on" phone draining its battery until I need to transmit to someone. 1W is only going to be useful to hit repeaters in an urban environment - but because it's 2m (and not 70cm), it's even less likely to be all that useful beyond a neat/fun build.
I wonder how good the range would be. I was thinking that even if I didn't have the appropriate license, having something like this in a pocket on my backpack would at least give me one more signaling option in an emergency. I could deal with the fines later.
See https://www.n1fd.org/2019/03/23/tape-measure-yagi/ for a upgrade to a 2 meter HT that will make it into a repeater 100 miles away under ordinary conditions and could go 300 miles under extraordinary conditions.
You need to know the squelch keys for repeaters and get some practice, it never hurts to get to know the people who run the repeaters, check in on the nightly net, know who is listening. So it is worth getting the technician license, there is no Morse code, just a multiple choice test run by friendly hams.
One rainy night I was talking to an amateur storm chaser who was reporting on conditions close to the inlet and asking why the repeater wasn’t so busy during storms like back in the day there were lots of storm chasers and I told him that NOAA advises people not to drive into flooding prone regions so most of us don’t do that because we don’t want to become part of the emergency.
Other times in the rain the air is silent but you know there is at least one ham monitoring who will call 911.
Generally speaking, line of sight. Assuming you're in the US, the FCC wouldn't come after you for using this in an emergency situation unless you were being absolutely egregious about stomping on other emergency comms, even then I seriously doubt you'd see a fine.
Having said that you're basically going to need enough knowledge to pass the test to make use of this anyway. Why not just take the test and be legal?
Well, for white pages, it used to be name to phone number lookup, not, you know, physical address, in almost all cases. Yellow pages were different ofc. And the tide against that turned 20 years ago, which congress banned that for cellphones.
In any case, sounds like "yes".
Not a deal breaker, but concerning. I know folks in my home would be opposed to my doing it.
Sometimes yes, not always, and practice decreased as privacy concerns increased. The old one for our city that was still printed up to about a decade ago did not have them.
And yeah, could probably find some way to spoof.
And yes, people can find things, just makes folks here uncomfortable that it would be readily available to a random nut in a short list linked to a "pseudo" one might be using routinely.
Anyway. It's one more hassle and disincentive. I'm interested in its potential for an emergency out in the woods (I'd be carrying my phone anyway, so a tiny pocket dongle is far less weight than a radio), but if I learn how to use it, I probably won't go for the license.
VHF / 2m is basically line of sight. But it will go for long distances. I've worked the repeater on the ISS with a 5W handheld radio and a 1/4 wave antenna.
Turn your Android phone into a laser pointer (with a USB attachment)
Turn your Android phone into a bowling ball (by submerging it in resin that is then shaped into a bowling ball)
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