$10

I used to love putting our nextels into direct mode at jobsites and such --never found a better radio for floor to floor or basement to street level comms

I have never used them. I am kinda aware about them however. I was reading a thread somewhere about Dayton this year and they said they would be monitoring one of the channels.

Today I was at a second hand electronics store where they have a bin of old cell phones. I was thinking about finding an old android for droidAPRS when I found these two. I did a quick search and think the i580s will work, just need to find a couple sims.

yep and you will have to put them in "moto talk" or "direct talk" mode it will be burried somewhere in the menu structure to turn it on --I have at least one nextel sim here on the desk if you need it.

What kind of SIMs do you need? I have a box of old att sims somewhere.

I will need two. If you have them I would be happy to buy/trade for them. If not what about these?






Also I tried an old ATT (cingular ) and it was a no go.

I have four of the Motorola I355's with the fixed antennas. My wife and her friends used three of them on a cruise last month.  The only disadvantages are the 0.6 watts output and the inability to turn the audible beep-beep off Stealth mode would require an earphone. This is partially compensated by the fewer persons having knowledge of the off-line ability and the multiples channels (150).

Not bad at all for the price.

RS

This is one of the things I like about youse guys.

Need a Mk XIV BC-604-7 univistor from an 1854 crunion pin off a hot air balloon like the one TR used in Cuba back in '98?

"I got a bunch of 'em! Buck apiece!"

No shit.

those should work --just like one I have --we used to swap em phone to phone and between diffrent models depending upon what we had when a guy broke one or got it wet the girl in our office who took care of the phones had boxes of them especially when we upgraded to new models. Her desk probably has dozens of those SIMs in it.....too bad I dont work there anymore.
 

I have a small pile of old Nextels like that I picked up off eBay recently. I haven't had a chance to do any range testing yet, but shouldn't be any worse than an FRS radio - and possibly a bit better in some cases(I've heard some stories of long range that I don't quite believe unless they were out in a flat open desert). Finding some not legally obtainable software is probably helpful for working with these things(ie Lab RSS, which ends up on the torrent sites but was never supposed to exit outside of Moto facilities - and likely full of viruses or mal/spyware), especially if you are having trouble finding SIM cards, or if you end up with Boost phones that have MotoTalk disabled.

I've got a pair of 3g AT&T SIMs, and maybe a couple from my tour in Belgium and Germany.

If the old GSM one didn't work, you may need to buy those, do you know if that one was blacklisted, or did it just not initialize?

It really doesn't matter if it is blacklisted or not, as Nextel phones can no longer make contact via cellular network - the whole network is gone. It's not verifying anything with anybody, although it is trying to make contact. I am curious if they can be made to stop looking for the network, which would save a good 15-20 seconds after turning them on before being able to get into the DirectTalk app(not to mention eliminating the potential for interference to the new users of those frequencies). As for what SIMs actually work, I'm not entirely sure - if the phone has been unlocked, a GSM SIM might work. I don't know what(or if) the specific differences between a regular GSM and a Nextel/Boost SIM might be. And information on Nextel phones is becoming hard to find, since most people have just chucked them in the garbage.



 

I just bought 2 128k black nextel sims off ebay. $5 and free shipping. What I have read that is the most trouble free way to go.

Question though, can pictures and messages be sent over the direct connect network?

If these work I want to build a nextel to 2m cross band repeater

They work surprisingly well. We tried them out doing car to car surveillance and could get up to a half a mile at times.

Ah, so essentially, using an old iDEN phone could be jamming Public Service 800-band. I didn't know they gave up their spectrum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextel_Communications#Radio_interference

It seemed like our had a way to make them operate in DT mode only. When PS was rebanded they went down to the lower half of 800 and NT went to the upper. They might have the updated bandplan anyway that would transmit into nothing.

It's probably not a concern, most public safety radios radiate a lot more than 5w, and looking at the whole bandplan, it doesn't look like it could do much.

Those mis-configured and ill-installed cellular "repeaters" do more damage to the PS band than these little guys could.

I have a bunch of old Nextel i570's with extra sim cards, yellow and black.
Would they be any good for this?
Does it take some sort of external sim programmer?

If this is not appropriate please delete..

The i570 is a DT-compatible phone. Should be just fine as long as you have Nextel SIM cards, which is sounds like you do(some a-holes on eBay sell the phones without SIMs making people hunt for them). Keep in mind that if they are Boost pre-paid Nextel phones they may need to be reprogrammed with the hard to find software to turn that app on, as Boost usually turned it off.


But back to proper working Nextel phones... Just turn on the phone and look in the apps menu for Direct Talk or Moto Talk. Launch the app, make sure all phones are on the same channel and code, and they should be talking to each other!





http://blogs.n1zyy.com/n1zyy/direct-talk-compatible-phones/
 

My sim cards came in today. It took me a while messing around to find the menu setting for direct talk. I got them talking and working great. Tomorrow I am going to try and watch them with the sdr.

I have a couple retired i880 phones I use sometimes, that feature works pretty well (and as cell phones they were about as robust as they come).    I did not know the phones had to have a SIM to work, that seems kind of odd, but these were my own phones I just kept as-is after deactivating.

It would be a useful experiment, I think, to design a codeplug which inhibits the search for cell service because operating out of cell range they eat up the battery capacity pretty fast (at least that has been my experience).

Direct talk actually uses the 900 MHz ISM band (while the networked phone service used the 800 SMR band), unlicensed use in the U.S. is completely legit so there are no worries about interference to present licensed carriers (but anyone who has ever had one knows, at close range they will disrupt just about anything).

The Nextel IDEN network is completely shut down now as far as I know, and it was planned to be sold off to the U.S. government and reconfigured to some other use, but I'm betting that isn't happening.   The best data rate it will do is about 90 Kbps, not terribly useful these days (but we are talking about government).   There is still one regional IDEN network in the SE U.S. and there are many private and government networks in use, plus many cell networks in other countries.