Can someone post more details about the CB service he was using in his car? Is it something we could still use nowadays? I know this sounds like a really dumb question but I imagine the look on the face of a girlfriend if I started talking on an artefact like that WITH OTHER REAL PEOPLE hahahaha!
shareI think it was a Mobile Radiotelephone, the precursor to cell phones both in the UK and the US.
shareQuite right!
Back in the 60's the earlier mobile telephone were expensive and all calls were operator assisted (you would tell the operator the number)
Later the phone companies developed DTMF dial phones nor use in cars. They also were quite expensive and there were a limited number of channels (pairs of frequencies). I think only 11 calls could be made from cars at the same time in my area.
I used a DTMF phone for a while. Later, of course, switched to cell phone. My first cell phone came in a carrier bag, had a heavy battery, had a cigar lighter plug and an antenna that was held on the car roof by a magnet
Times have changed!!!
The old mobile radiotelephones (in the US) looked like this:
http://www.arctos.com/dial/1970-mobile-1.jpg
later ones were touch-tone.
thanks for that cf99!
They had access to 11 frequency pairs. The eleven buttons on the top row would manually select a frequency. Ordinarily one of the buttons below would would select for automatically choosing an open frequency, I an emergency you could push one of the frequency buttons and ask the people on the line to get off and then dial "0" and ask the operator for fire, police etc.