43 Comments on Radio Shack Cellular Phone Commercial
It worked well with your TRS-80 you had at home…
9
I had one of those only it was a Nokia and 1986. Had to use the mag mount antenna for range due to cell site spacing at the time.
6
$799? How much is that in current dollars? Who would have been able to spend that kind of money back then? Not me!
9
I had one of those. It was cumbersome, had a bag to hold a battery, spare battery, transmitter, charger, and antenna, and was a 3 watt analog signal to punch through anything because cell towers were few and far between then.
And it was great. I used it for emergencies (I was an FF/EMT then in a VERY marked personal vehicle so I got flagged a lot), dates (they were kinda rare then and more impressive to the fairer sex than now), and just calling people when the mood hit me instead of having to find a phone booth (look it up, kids, there used to be coin-op “public phones”) or go home.
It had a low power setting I never used and a magnet mount vehicle antenna I never needed, along with a cigarette lighter plug (again, look it up younger ones) for vehicle use. It went through a few batteries and I ultimately had to give it up because both the batteries and the analog signal became obsolete.
It also wasn’t very stealthy because the Touch Tones were quite audible when you dialed and the number pad was backlit. And sticking it in the bag didn’t hang it up, you had to push the END button.
And it was Radio Shack, so sometime in the last 30 years the casing on the handset-to-transmitter cable brittled and broke, so the coil shape is lost and the individual wires are exposed. Without a battery or a service it is little more than an antique curiosity now, but it proved the concept for all time.
Too bad Radio Shack couldn’t have stayed that innovative. I spent a lot there when I was younger, and crappy Realistic speakers aside, I was sorry to see them go.
10
LocoBlancoSaltine
AT 11:34 PM
“It worked well with your TRS-80 you had at home…”
…don’t dis the Trash-80. It taught me logical thinking, BASIC programming, machine language programming, and made me learn how to address individual pixels in an XY coordinate scheme as well as computer hardware and software building and how to access peripherals, all skills I used to build a career that sustains me to this day.
Althogh at the time I just thought I was playing word game adventures and figuring out the timing to make it display the lyrics to “Rock And Roll Fantasy” in time with the music comimg from my Realistic turntable…
10
We Bell mofos had the Mobile Telephone Unit at L street. Fucking 2 inch copper sheets on the walls, the floor, the ceiling. They were all dead within 5 years of retirement. Take it how you may.
9
Today’s woke companies: “hey, let’s insult the fuck out of our customer base.”
Radio Shack: “hey, let’s offer our customers FREE BATTERIES!”
Progressives ruin everything…
13
Good, better, best. I bought my share of Radio Shack stuff. I still have a little VOM in my toolbox that I purchased there. I remember having to explain to the clerk what a VOM was.
11
I still have a Radio Shack oxy/butane torch too. One REALLY nice thing about Radio Shack it that they did NOT assume their customers were morons.
And considering you could buy breadboards and individual electronic components you would pick out of a bin yourself to make custom electronic devices, they were probably right to think that you weren’t.
14
Radio Shack was the shit. I used to get damn near whatever I wanted. Even Pickering stylus and cartridges. And the Zener diodes that were so fucking scarce. Then I went to ABC. ABC had everything. Name it. It was in a bin, somewhere.
8
Heathkit had amazing stuff too for the day, but it was too pricey for me. Radio Shack was kind of the poor man’s Heathkit.
12
I had a phone like that although not from Radio Shack. I worked in Tacoma and lived in Seattle. In December 1990 we had the worst snow in 20 years which hit while I was driving home. I started out on clear roads and was probably 6-8 inches deep by the time I got to Seattle. My wife thought I should have some way of communicating in such situations. As I recall, airtime was 29 cents a minute. I used the phone maybe 2 or 3 times.
9
Did you ever make a crystal radio with a germanium diode, Eric? I thought that batteryless radio was the coolest thing EVAH back in the day…
10
I had a Heathkit O scope. And a Heathkit Transmission loss set.
8
I had a similar one (a later model “bag phone”), only because I had a connection to get these things for free. Really disliked using it though, if I remember correctly it was about $1 per minute for the cell connection, and standard bell phone rates on top of that. Although I don’t remember any monthly service charge, but if there was one it was really cheap, especially compared to monthly rates on cell phones today. And there was most certainly no yearly contract.
4
I never made a radio, SNS. My forte in those days was making a guitar amplifier. I sucked at it. But they all worked. I hate the fact that I screwed up the best shit on the planet.
5
3 watt transmitter.Analog.Go 40 miles to
cell tower.{8 miles today because of electronic
speed of light timing issues}. 3db gain antenna.
When roof mounted it would “walk the dog”…..
BTW= Don’t stare into the antenna.
4
SNS & ERIC know their stuff. I build and repair
guitar amps in my Lab.
5
You guys sound a lot like me!
4
Since this thread entails old tech, this guy is really good at explaining many varieties of it:
it was $1 per minute then which is like $200 billion today.
4
At :23…
“Hi Mom. I’ve decided I am a girl. I’m headed off to the scout leader’s tent to learn what girls do.”
1
Radio Shack, Lafayette Electronics, Heathkit, Allied Knight Kits, Eico….
Sure was a lot of opportunities to learn back then. Now we just get email spammed, telemarketed from India and harassed from Window, Siding and Door outfits telling me they are going to be in the neighborhood.
Really glad I was able to live back when we had a free country….
3
Radio Shack, Lafayette Electronics, Heathkit, Allied Knight Kits, Eico…. and Olsen Electronics too in my neck of the woods back in the 60s and 70s.
4
@Wild Bill –
What is a VOM?
1
Volt-Ohm-Meter, Ted
2
I had one, it was $1 a minute to use, it sure beat standing in the rain to use a payphone to make a client appointment in Houston, TX
3
LocoBlancoSaltine
AT 10:56 AM
“Volt-Ohm-Meter, Ted”
…the old-school kind with a thin, mirrored needle, multiple etched scales, a plastic screw to zero it, many places to put assorted leads, and a guarantee it would blow up your meter, your project, or both if you plugged the wrong lead in the wrong hole or hooked your 120 volt meter to 480.
2
SNS, every Fluke meter I came across that had mA current functionality, ALWAYS had the fuse blown from some jackwagon trying to read across the circuit instead of inline.
Never was a surprise…
2
Loved Radio Shack but they always asked for your name, address and phone number, even if you were only buying batteries, ha!
2
LocoBlancoSaltine
AT 3:01 PM
Fluke? Nah, when I was just getting into it I couldn’t afford or even know about REAL stuff like that! Archer or Suntune or REAL low end stuff like that was MY world, my training, and sometimes my mistake…
SNS, my first was a Simpson analog meter in the black Bakelite shell.
I stole it from school.
I have a Fluke 787 that does everything I currently need.
1
I still have the big Simpson 260 meter. They issued those in the telco because they could easily be used for ballistic tests. You did mutual capacitance, and then ring to ground, tip to ground. They weren’t as handy as a Sidekick, which could do “stress”, and dBrnC. Later Sidekicks could do dBm, load coils, and some other crap we already had purpose-built test sets for. They doubled the size and weight of the Sidekicks and made them pretty much junk. I carried the old version my whole career.
2
The idea of a set that does everything is just a terrible idea. The Dynatel 965DSP did come pretty close, though. I still prefer to see the needle, HOW it sweeps, HOW it settles. Digital just can’t tell me all the things the needle tells me.
2
I suppose it depends on what you work on the most.
Doing field work I might could have used a signal generator & O’scope, yet couldn’t drag them along.
I mostly needed a small current/ voltage generator that my Fluke provides.
Prior to that, one of my favorite tools was a little box about the size of a pack of cigs that did only that.
The airport security in Israel made a big deal out of that box every time I passed through… Sigh*
2
I was special services in the telco. We had different test sets for just about everything. T1 set, T3, PRI (primary rate interface), ISDN, DDS (digital data 56 or 64k), transmission set, load coil set, DID (direct inward dial), ground-start, and a little box that did REN. We also… well, I also carried a the 965 which did TDR, and Wheatstone Bridge amongst other things. I also carried D4 extenders and at one time had a MFT (metallic facility termination) extender. I also had a 76C set which would tone to a short.
With a van you carried everything, of course, but I spent my last years on walking crew and had to be judicious about what I carried. I couldn’t carry it all and had to be careful about my job loading. And dispatch was good about not fucking us all up.
2
When laptops started adding peripherals and RJ-11, RJ-45 ports, 9-pin serial comms, USB, Firewire, etc. it made life easier as well.
I was able to leave my HART communicator at home, since a small adaptor & software was all I needed.
I used to also make my own RS422/485/232 9/15/32 pin serial cables myself in the field since I could make custom lengths.
Of course now with wireless, Bluetooth, CAT 6, etc. comms are so much faster.
1
Yup. We only used laptops for CATs (craft access terminals). In the old days the T1 test sets were just the 209s and shit like that you’d find in a CO. When the 2209 T1 set came out we could do TL1 to the cards to change settings and record loop attenuations and margins. Then they had 2209s that could do T1 and PRIs in the same set. Then they added T3 functions and jacks. So eventually three of those sets became one… and that made sense because it was just software to make that other shit work… and some T3 jacks.
1
I became the city PRI guy because I was the only one with enough sense to turn off the card’s performance monitoring… even though we all had the same training. In a T1 the least significant digit is for monitoring and CRC errors. In a PRI the least significant digit is for supervision. A PRI won’t do shit if its supervision is stripped off for CRCs.
I even ended up teaching the class a few times and checked that they all could do TL1, and the sets had the proper cords to do TL1. Didn’t matter. Whenever a PRI popped up in dispatch for a trouble or install i got the job.
1
Oh, and we had nothing but problems with TV and radio engineers. They took dBs in dBVAC, and never understood we always terminated the measurement with different terminations depending on which way we were “looking” and what type of ckt it was. We terminated at 600 ohms, 135 ohms, and a bunch of other shit that was in the NSRM (network services reference manual).
Nothing but a clusterfuck. I can’t tell you how many times the ABC radio guy and I got into red-faced arguments about this silly shit. Measure what you are supposed to measure, you miserable fuckstick! He was an excellent engineer otherwise. But damn… don’t get us arguing about dBm, dBVAC, dBrnC, VUs… FUCK!
Luckily the ABC Radio Boss was a former telco dude himself and understood many things. He also understood what 99.9% up-time meant and told those clowns how much down-time that was in an hour, a day, a week, a month, and a year. He had a scary brain like my Dad, my Uncle, my Grandfathers, and my wife.
It worked well with your TRS-80 you had at home…
I had one of those only it was a Nokia and 1986. Had to use the mag mount antenna for range due to cell site spacing at the time.
$799? How much is that in current dollars? Who would have been able to spend that kind of money back then? Not me!
I had one of those. It was cumbersome, had a bag to hold a battery, spare battery, transmitter, charger, and antenna, and was a 3 watt analog signal to punch through anything because cell towers were few and far between then.
And it was great. I used it for emergencies (I was an FF/EMT then in a VERY marked personal vehicle so I got flagged a lot), dates (they were kinda rare then and more impressive to the fairer sex than now), and just calling people when the mood hit me instead of having to find a phone booth (look it up, kids, there used to be coin-op “public phones”) or go home.
It had a low power setting I never used and a magnet mount vehicle antenna I never needed, along with a cigarette lighter plug (again, look it up younger ones) for vehicle use. It went through a few batteries and I ultimately had to give it up because both the batteries and the analog signal became obsolete.
It also wasn’t very stealthy because the Touch Tones were quite audible when you dialed and the number pad was backlit. And sticking it in the bag didn’t hang it up, you had to push the END button.
And it was Radio Shack, so sometime in the last 30 years the casing on the handset-to-transmitter cable brittled and broke, so the coil shape is lost and the individual wires are exposed. Without a battery or a service it is little more than an antique curiosity now, but it proved the concept for all time.
Too bad Radio Shack couldn’t have stayed that innovative. I spent a lot there when I was younger, and crappy Realistic speakers aside, I was sorry to see them go.
LocoBlancoSaltine
AT 11:34 PM
“It worked well with your TRS-80 you had at home…”
…don’t dis the Trash-80. It taught me logical thinking, BASIC programming, machine language programming, and made me learn how to address individual pixels in an XY coordinate scheme as well as computer hardware and software building and how to access peripherals, all skills I used to build a career that sustains me to this day.
Althogh at the time I just thought I was playing word game adventures and figuring out the timing to make it display the lyrics to “Rock And Roll Fantasy” in time with the music comimg from my Realistic turntable…
We Bell mofos had the Mobile Telephone Unit at L street. Fucking 2 inch copper sheets on the walls, the floor, the ceiling. They were all dead within 5 years of retirement. Take it how you may.
Today’s woke companies: “hey, let’s insult the fuck out of our customer base.”
Radio Shack: “hey, let’s offer our customers FREE BATTERIES!”
Progressives ruin everything…
Good, better, best. I bought my share of Radio Shack stuff. I still have a little VOM in my toolbox that I purchased there. I remember having to explain to the clerk what a VOM was.
I still have a Radio Shack oxy/butane torch too. One REALLY nice thing about Radio Shack it that they did NOT assume their customers were morons.
And considering you could buy breadboards and individual electronic components you would pick out of a bin yourself to make custom electronic devices, they were probably right to think that you weren’t.
Radio Shack was the shit. I used to get damn near whatever I wanted. Even Pickering stylus and cartridges. And the Zener diodes that were so fucking scarce. Then I went to ABC. ABC had everything. Name it. It was in a bin, somewhere.
Heathkit had amazing stuff too for the day, but it was too pricey for me. Radio Shack was kind of the poor man’s Heathkit.
I had a phone like that although not from Radio Shack. I worked in Tacoma and lived in Seattle. In December 1990 we had the worst snow in 20 years which hit while I was driving home. I started out on clear roads and was probably 6-8 inches deep by the time I got to Seattle. My wife thought I should have some way of communicating in such situations. As I recall, airtime was 29 cents a minute. I used the phone maybe 2 or 3 times.
Did you ever make a crystal radio with a germanium diode, Eric? I thought that batteryless radio was the coolest thing EVAH back in the day…
I had a Heathkit O scope. And a Heathkit Transmission loss set.
I had a similar one (a later model “bag phone”), only because I had a connection to get these things for free. Really disliked using it though, if I remember correctly it was about $1 per minute for the cell connection, and standard bell phone rates on top of that. Although I don’t remember any monthly service charge, but if there was one it was really cheap, especially compared to monthly rates on cell phones today. And there was most certainly no yearly contract.
I never made a radio, SNS. My forte in those days was making a guitar amplifier. I sucked at it. But they all worked. I hate the fact that I screwed up the best shit on the planet.
3 watt transmitter.Analog.Go 40 miles to
cell tower.{8 miles today because of electronic
speed of light timing issues}. 3db gain antenna.
When roof mounted it would “walk the dog”…..
BTW= Don’t stare into the antenna.
SNS & ERIC know their stuff. I build and repair
guitar amps in my Lab.
You guys sound a lot like me!
Since this thread entails old tech, this guy is really good at explaining many varieties of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbHBHhZOglw
Fudge.
:tosses semaphore flags in trash:
@Burr—
“…Julius Caesar on an Aldis Lamp…”
Balderdash Burr
AT 3:11 AM
…go a little further back (mild naughtiness warning)…
https://youtu.be/FbGTgxCYrHY
it was $1 per minute then which is like $200 billion today.
At :23…
“Hi Mom. I’ve decided I am a girl. I’m headed off to the scout leader’s tent to learn what girls do.”
Radio Shack, Lafayette Electronics, Heathkit, Allied Knight Kits, Eico….
Sure was a lot of opportunities to learn back then. Now we just get email spammed, telemarketed from India and harassed from Window, Siding and Door outfits telling me they are going to be in the neighborhood.
Really glad I was able to live back when we had a free country….
Radio Shack, Lafayette Electronics, Heathkit, Allied Knight Kits, Eico…. and Olsen Electronics too in my neck of the woods back in the 60s and 70s.
@Wild Bill –
What is a VOM?
Volt-Ohm-Meter, Ted
I had one, it was $1 a minute to use, it sure beat standing in the rain to use a payphone to make a client appointment in Houston, TX
LocoBlancoSaltine
AT 10:56 AM
“Volt-Ohm-Meter, Ted”
…the old-school kind with a thin, mirrored needle, multiple etched scales, a plastic screw to zero it, many places to put assorted leads, and a guarantee it would blow up your meter, your project, or both if you plugged the wrong lead in the wrong hole or hooked your 120 volt meter to 480.
SNS, every Fluke meter I came across that had mA current functionality, ALWAYS had the fuse blown from some jackwagon trying to read across the circuit instead of inline.
Never was a surprise…
Loved Radio Shack but they always asked for your name, address and phone number, even if you were only buying batteries, ha!
LocoBlancoSaltine
AT 3:01 PM
Fluke? Nah, when I was just getting into it I couldn’t afford or even know about REAL stuff like that! Archer or Suntune or REAL low end stuff like that was MY world, my training, and sometimes my mistake…
https://www.ebay.com/itm/275740656736
SNS, my first was a Simpson analog meter in the black Bakelite shell.
I stole it from school.
I have a Fluke 787 that does everything I currently need.
I still have the big Simpson 260 meter. They issued those in the telco because they could easily be used for ballistic tests. You did mutual capacitance, and then ring to ground, tip to ground. They weren’t as handy as a Sidekick, which could do “stress”, and dBrnC. Later Sidekicks could do dBm, load coils, and some other crap we already had purpose-built test sets for. They doubled the size and weight of the Sidekicks and made them pretty much junk. I carried the old version my whole career.
The idea of a set that does everything is just a terrible idea. The Dynatel 965DSP did come pretty close, though. I still prefer to see the needle, HOW it sweeps, HOW it settles. Digital just can’t tell me all the things the needle tells me.
I suppose it depends on what you work on the most.
Doing field work I might could have used a signal generator & O’scope, yet couldn’t drag them along.
I mostly needed a small current/ voltage generator that my Fluke provides.
Prior to that, one of my favorite tools was a little box about the size of a pack of cigs that did only that.
The airport security in Israel made a big deal out of that box every time I passed through… Sigh*
I was special services in the telco. We had different test sets for just about everything. T1 set, T3, PRI (primary rate interface), ISDN, DDS (digital data 56 or 64k), transmission set, load coil set, DID (direct inward dial), ground-start, and a little box that did REN. We also… well, I also carried a the 965 which did TDR, and Wheatstone Bridge amongst other things. I also carried D4 extenders and at one time had a MFT (metallic facility termination) extender. I also had a 76C set which would tone to a short.
With a van you carried everything, of course, but I spent my last years on walking crew and had to be judicious about what I carried. I couldn’t carry it all and had to be careful about my job loading. And dispatch was good about not fucking us all up.
When laptops started adding peripherals and RJ-11, RJ-45 ports, 9-pin serial comms, USB, Firewire, etc. it made life easier as well.
I was able to leave my HART communicator at home, since a small adaptor & software was all I needed.
I used to also make my own RS422/485/232 9/15/32 pin serial cables myself in the field since I could make custom lengths.
Of course now with wireless, Bluetooth, CAT 6, etc. comms are so much faster.
Yup. We only used laptops for CATs (craft access terminals). In the old days the T1 test sets were just the 209s and shit like that you’d find in a CO. When the 2209 T1 set came out we could do TL1 to the cards to change settings and record loop attenuations and margins. Then they had 2209s that could do T1 and PRIs in the same set. Then they added T3 functions and jacks. So eventually three of those sets became one… and that made sense because it was just software to make that other shit work… and some T3 jacks.
I became the city PRI guy because I was the only one with enough sense to turn off the card’s performance monitoring… even though we all had the same training. In a T1 the least significant digit is for monitoring and CRC errors. In a PRI the least significant digit is for supervision. A PRI won’t do shit if its supervision is stripped off for CRCs.
I even ended up teaching the class a few times and checked that they all could do TL1, and the sets had the proper cords to do TL1. Didn’t matter. Whenever a PRI popped up in dispatch for a trouble or install i got the job.
Oh, and we had nothing but problems with TV and radio engineers. They took dBs in dBVAC, and never understood we always terminated the measurement with different terminations depending on which way we were “looking” and what type of ckt it was. We terminated at 600 ohms, 135 ohms, and a bunch of other shit that was in the NSRM (network services reference manual).
Nothing but a clusterfuck. I can’t tell you how many times the ABC radio guy and I got into red-faced arguments about this silly shit. Measure what you are supposed to measure, you miserable fuckstick! He was an excellent engineer otherwise. But damn… don’t get us arguing about dBm, dBVAC, dBrnC, VUs… FUCK!
Luckily the ABC Radio Boss was a former telco dude himself and understood many things. He also understood what 99.9% up-time meant and told those clowns how much down-time that was in an hour, a day, a week, a month, and a year. He had a scary brain like my Dad, my Uncle, my Grandfathers, and my wife.