My new Cell Phone 8/2005

Yes, this is my new cell phone. You can buy one too at www.sparkfun.com

It is a Portable Rotary Cell Phone.

I like it when people gawk at me receiving calls in the supermarket or at restaurants.
Tonight I was in the plastics isle buying 13 gallon garbage bags and the phone rang. The store fell silent. 
I was talking on the phone to my nephew while paying for the garbage bags and the 
checkout guy was staring at me. Finally he gathered the guts to ask me, "Is it real?"

"YES! It's my cell phone!"

People also look at me strangely when I am yakking on it in my convertible Alfa Spider. "WHAT's THAT?"

"My cell phone!"

What is wonderful is the earpiece volume is actually plenty LOUD enough to HEAR while driving in a convertible. And the ringer is LOUD enough to actually HEAR in a convertible, or when I am more than 10 feet away from it, or in another room.
Unlike conventional stupid electronic ringtone phones. That's so Y2K. I'm over it already.

The Cingular telephone store people thought I was on crack when I brought it in to sign up for the 2-phone "family plan". By cell phone, I think they thought I meant I had stolen it from my "cell" when I escaped from the loony bin. It was hard to explain to them that I did not require my "address book" to be transferred from my old SIM card to the new one for the rotary phone. The free Nokia 3120 they gave me is now just an address book for me. I never use that phone, to, like, talk on. Why would you when you have a Portable Rotary Cell Phone?

   The gutz.

I hacked mine.

First I installed a power jack so I could charge it without taking the cover off.

I bought a "M" 5.5mm chassis jack and
mating plug at Radio Shack. The plug is P/N 274-1569 and the jack is P/N
274-1582. Then I fabricated a little angle bracket in my machine shop. I mounted the switch up on the
bottom plate behind the mouse hole where the LINE used to go into the phone.
Wired it up to the + and - on the PCB under the battery connector. Rewired
the charger to the plug. So now I can charge the battery without having to
open up the phone. This is a switching jack so one *could* wire it to
automatically break the lead from the battery to the PCB so it forces the
battery to be disconnected while charging, but I am still not convinced that
is necessary. In any case, I am doing that if I turn off the phone by my EAO
switch while charging... just to be safe.

Next I hot glued an EAO pushbutton SPST switch to the back of the bell holder
just above an existing hole. Wired that across the internal power off slide switch. I set this
slide switch to OFF so my switch overrides it to ON or OFF. Now I can poke a
paper clip or some other pokey thing in there and turn off the phone without
having to open up the housing. I might enlarge that hole a bit....

The antenna was not nice flying around inside the phone. The cable was
actually breaking off the PCB. I Stripped the cable back and re-soldered it
to the antenna PCB. Used some plastic spacers and a 4-40 screw and nut with
a washer to mount it fixed to the larger hole on the dial upright post.
Using that larger hole instead of the smaller lower hole below it allows the
GM862 board to slide out easier when changing the SIM card.

Then I cleaned up the rest of the non-mounted parts and 
double stuck the battery to the bottom plate, drilled a coupla holes to
mount the PCBs with 2 screws instead of 0 or 1 screw so stuff doesn't fly
around. The mountings have to be half decent cuz this is a PORTABLE phone,
ya know...

Anyway, that's what I did! Sparkfun.com did all the hard work :>)

<BGSOUND src="http://www.manleylabs.com/audio/ring.mp3">