Old factory car phone junk

[RX7guy]

Can I rip all that crap out?

[cschollum]

yes and no, be carefull incase it is the version that interacts with the LCD check control, otherwise when you remove the phone you will get no messages on your lcd as the circuit is broken, its a simple fix to join 2 wires together, but i cant remember which.
If it doesnt display messages on your lcd(many didnt) then yes just remove it

[Jay 535i]

Don't forget to ditch this too:



Man, it's funny just how thoroughly obsolete the "car phone" is. Do you remember when having one of those squiggly things on your rear window was actually some kind of status symbol?

[Kalevera]

Sell the kit on ebay. For whatever reason, people are hot to get them.

best, whit

[SchnellE34]

Can I rip all that crap out?

Chech your PMs

[E34 530]

Don't forget to ditch this too:



Man, it's funny just how thoroughly obsolete the "car phone" is. Do you remember when having one of those squiggly things on your rear window was actually some kind of status symbol?

Obsolete??? Car phones are like 20 times more powerful than your everyday cell phone and will make a call ANYWHERE. A regular cell phone has like 2 volts of power while the car phones have anywhere from 3-9 watts of power.

[sKilled]

It's not the power, it's the external antenna that make them so great. A car is nothing other than a Faraday Cage (def thanks to wikipedia.org:an enclosure designed to exclude electromagnetic fields. It is an application of Gauss's law, one of Maxwell's equations. Gauss's law describes the distribution of electrical charge on a conducting form, such as a sphere, a plane, a torus, etc. Intuitively, since like charges repel each other, charge will "migrate" to the surface of the conducting form).
This means that it is very diffivult for the signal from the cellphone to get out of the car, whilst it is difficult for external signals to get in.
So if I were you, I would consider perhaps replacing the ugly external antenna with a more visually pleasing version, and hotwiring a cradle for your current phone into the system.

[cschollum]

here in the UK, most car phones of the fixed variety that were fitted when the car was new like in 1989 1990 no longer work, as the network they were on (analogue) has been switched off - therefore we remove them.

There are fixed versions that work on the later frequencies GSM and these are around 8 Watts, and yes the arial does help but the power output is produced by the transiver not the arial, going off skilled's approach, if you stuck a car arial on a mobile phone you would get an 8 watt mobile, completly incorrect.

[Blitzkrieg Bob]

True the old car phones put out real Watts, but those models disappered real quick once cell phones caught on and the carriers put up more cells. Those old hi wattage models were soon overdriving the system, so even the car phones soon went to milliwatts too.

Plus I don't think the old models are supported any more by the carriers.

[sKilled]

True, but what I meant was if it is doable, to use the old wiring that is already in place. Saves time and money.