I worked for Nokia at the time these must have came out. These are obviously counterfeit, but Nokia *actually* considered real products that could work as walkie-talkies on the ISM/GMRS bands. The key issues were performance, licensing and business model. People expected internal antennas even in the early 2000, which is not playing well with the 70cm bands these would be most likely to operate in. The licensing was and is hard, as millions of PTT capable phones could not only swamp a band and render it useless, but unlike mobile phones, which only transmit on a band when a permitted cellular network allows them, these would transmit when the PTT button is pressed and would be illegal in many places. And thirdly, the mobile phone operators didn’t want to take complaints from users who didn’t understand that some communication goes through the cellular network and some goes direct. PoC (push to talk over cellular) was introduced instead.
The phone held by the girl on the box is an old Scandinavian mobile phone used in the old NMT450 network, and the model is Mobira MD59. Fun trivia is that there were eprom images that could be replaced in the phone to turn it into a 70cm ham radio.
I actually have one of those Mobiras, with the custom EPROM. I bought it from the estate of a deceased ham in Kokkola about a decade ago. It has a fault with the LCD, and need to repair it some day.
Germany hams used it a lot. I tried to modify a similar analog C-Netz 460 MHz mobile phone for the 433 MHz ham band, but at the time it was not possible to get the parts anymore....
A long LONG time ago I had an actual ""Car Phone" - the first generation cellular type, made by Motorola. I had it moved to my new car from the old and the installer said they had never seen one so big - a massive box under the passenger seat. There was no compatible service in France, but on holiday in Normandy, I found that I could use cells in the Channel Islands while on the Cotentin peninsula about 20 miles away. When I moved across to the D-Day beaches, I was using cells on the Isle of Wight - NINETY MILES away!
Those were real duplexer cans in those original mobile phones. They were a real work of art and pretty much everything you needed for a 5 to 10 watt 900mhz 100% duty cycle repeater. They were powerful. An older 450 mobile telephone full duplex model I converted into a 5 watt repeater and with an antenna at 300 ft used it as the police repeater ;) It worked for them like that for almost 20 years and no one knew what it was... You don't need much power if you have a good location.
And the weird thing is, those frequencies are used worldwide for aviation. It's not like there's some country where those were CB or amateur bands at the time. Very odd.
These are very rarely less than 100khz spaced - so if you're inbetween - say 115.550 - and only doing 12.5Khz, it'll likely never interfere with anything. If it isn't a 11x.x frequency, it'll be 11x.x5 - so still 50Khz spacing. You can hide a lot in plane sight ;)
@@jonathankleinow2073 Unfortunatly there are several countries with cordless phones on uhf air band. Sometimes they even reached US mil sats and we could ear them in Europe, right from Asian countries or Russia.... Not much on VHF
That area of Dubai still has tons of dodgy stuff for sale. The best place is knaif. What's especially surprising is that handhelds etc are banned there, so back in the early 2000s everything was heavily controlled.
I saw some units that a friend who sold bootleg electronics in Ohio back in the 80's and 90's before he died. He had some units that were better made with large heatsinks that operated on 900 with a vertical collinear antenna. These units we were able to make 10 miles with an antenna on the roof of the car. It was like a bag phone and then the base. These were very illegal and fairly high power. He lived in a trailer so it was like a faraday cage from the antenna pumping out near microwave and many watts. He sold a bunch of these units including his demo. Some time later the FCC came sniffing around looking for him and the phones but he claimed he did not have them or know what they were talking about. They told him that they caught a guy using one and he claimed he bought it from my friend. I told him to lay low and don't import any more. It was one of the craziest things I ever saw. Units could be bought in 900 or 450 or 300 mhz ranges and the frequency could be set with dip switches. Nice find on this set. Its a similar much lower cost version of those original ones I saw back in the late 80's. Loved that video. I had forgotten this stuff and was delighted you discovered it.
According to a friend of mine who was fighting in the middle east back in 05-07 these long range cordless home phones are very common over there especially since they are far more lax with their frequencys over there
This actually looks like a knock off of the Senao SN-6610. If you look into super long range cordless phones, it was Senao who made the majority of them. They were marketed towards 3rd world countries that needed it. PM me if you want more info. Cheers!
We had a 'wave' of these equipments from Senao in countryside Brazil, mostly bought from Paraguay duty free shops by farm owners. They operated around 140-170MHz causing issues with amateur radio, taxi dispatching and public services.
Interesting indeed. When I first saw the 275/475MHz labels, I first thought about what they could interfere with - since the latter of the two is close to the bottom of the current DTV band. Then when you said about 146MHz, I thought it would be close to both FM and DAB services, which may cause interference if the signal is strong enough or the modulator was poor. I didn't know about what was on 115.350MHz but I certainly didn't know it was to do with UK airport communications and the like!
They did use to sell cordless phones (not Nokia branded though) with similar long range capabilities in the 1980's in Japan. I remember my uncle coming back from one of the many annual trips he went on there each year and telling us that you could walk into an electronics store and buy them off the shelf, but they were considered illegal in the United States.
Excellent work removing the antennas and limiting any broadcast range prior to testing... 👍 I would have hated to hear that the channel members were scrambling to bail you out of jail after the "radio police" came skidding up to your place with detector equipment and areials protruding from some official looking government van. Don't get me wrong: I think we would have posted bail and had you back home in record time, but I know government agencies can be overzealous in their day to day enforcement sometimes. Reminds me of the Monty Python skit about the cat detector Van. 😂
This was for areas/countrys that didnt have cell phone service and wouldnt be getting it anytime soon back then. So you could walk around your village and shiw off that u had a cell phone....and it worked
thing is, everything that is produced needs a market to sell on. the basic idea behind this is the million dollar question. it would fit into a middle eastern scenario, groups wanting to disturb or monitor aviation and military frequencies. or set up own short range communications with harmless nokia knockoffs.
the IR port on the 6150 was on the top of the handset - seen at 4:14 the semi circle black piece at 4:06 was just a little piece of trim, that could be taken off, but there was nothing behind it. I suspect there may have been a plan to make different ones to customise the phone with, but I don't think there was ever anything official. I still have one somewhere, and after buying a new battery for it a few years ago, it still worked... With an EE sim it showed one2one on the screen .
Such an odd thing! It would be really interesting to see your frequency measurements or a look inside the cases. Thanks for the very interesting video and keep up your great work!
back in the early 90s you could get a long range cordless that would do 5 miles. base unit with two large antenna and a long telescopic on the chunky handset... much beloved by farmers
Great video! That Nokia mobile phone form factor was popular (considered sophisticated) in the Middle East around that time. Dubai is interesting....remember seeing an Airband handheld transceiver on sale in Dubai duty free back in the day (icom if I remember correctly)..and that was one of two/three radios on display, the others being Japanese broadcast receivers!
I wonder how the creators of these came up with *that* frequency. How likely is it someone picks the worst possible frequency *by accident*? If they were operating on the advertised qrgs they might even get the advertised range via some mil UHF sat. ;)
@@rkan2 otherwise it would be very expensive to "duplex" them. That way it works very well without a fancy duplexer. Chek cross-band (145/433 MHz Ham repeater)....
Those usually worked in 256mhz base and 384mhz headset freq, 40 channels, where very popular in eastern Europe/Russia in the late 90s when cellular service was still extremely expensive.
kerosin520 You are absolutly right.... They sometines would enter US mil sats linear transponders and we could ear them all over the sat coverage (including Portugal)
These "long range cordless phones" used to be a thing here in the Philippines. Sellers advertised it as an alternative to expensive cellular calls back then.
Fascinating, Lewis, and what an odd setup! It's hard to imagine these things ever worked, even wherever they might have been legal. I suppose people will sell anything, cheers!
I got a cheap 2.4ghz walkie talkie set from the dollar store back in 2000, and I could have full on conversations with my grandmother if she used the cordless phone, I could also hear the person she was talking to on the other end of the line, but they couldn't hear me. Come to think of it I could've been extremely nefarious with it, but I never really cared enough to try aside from the once. I actually still have one of them somewhere, it's a fake CB unit that was like the "base", I lost both of the walkies though.
In the 1990s my FRG7 would accidentally pick up cordless phones around 1.9 khz if I had too much to drink and could not see the frequency readout. Well My next door neighbour a primary teacher was arranging to do things with men that I would never consider, and next door to him, she was telling her mother the chap who came around and stayed last night was the best ever. Only if these analogue phones had more output I might of got a 160m antenna up and been entertained for hours
Easy to pick up those early analogue cordless phones on a scanner & the next generation ones that operated on 30 - 40 Mhz too! Back in the days when owning a wideband scanner was a lot of fun!
I had several Nokias back in the day. I believe they were mostly of the 6161i style which had the flip down lid covering the buttons that would also answer and hang up. Nokia and Motorola owned the market from the early 90's through the early 2000's.
I worked at sea in the early 00s and pilots in ports in the US used something very similar. Had thought they were mobiles at first and then the dude started doing walkie talkie chat on it as well. Was dumbfounded 😂
In the late 80's there was a HAM radio guy who had a 'cordless' phone rigged up in his car. I don't know how he did it, but he had a regular looking cordless phone and base in his car, a large antenna on the back of his car. He could make calls (called radio stations to demonstrate), I assume it was a radio patch to his house across HAM bands with some sort of device to allow his cordless phone to operate as a handset.
I seem to remember that in the 1990s era you could buy combined phones, which doubled as both a cordless phone when in range of your base station but switched to mobile operation for use anywhere else, further afield. Might have been a Panasonic model.
Thank you brother, going to try put this on and relax for some sleep. This channel really does help as it brings me back down to earth at times. Like it's been said before radio is king, analogue at that. Emf is a thing for sure
You've definetly got a like on this one btw, I don't know why but somehow I had been unsubscribed from your channel yet not even missing a vid. Things seem a bit funny rn, I'm sure it's just me
In 1998 I got similar fake Nokia from abroad but it was cordless home phone it worked at the radius around 6 miles it interfered with police radio’s of course I didn’t know that till the radio airways eventually found me and taken it off me they didn’t charge me because I cooperated with them they said I am the first person in the uk to have these phone When they rang me I was at the doctors about a mile away with this Nokia and I talked to them with this Nokia cordless I carried it around in the city centre and people would be surprised and ask me what am I carrying 😊
Interesting. I have never heard about those "Nokia" super long range phones until now. Maybe they were only available in the Middle East. But even then, I thought the aircraft band was an world-wide allocation (including the Middle East). Now I have heard about illegal extended range cordless phones(here in the U.S.). I think I might have seen ads for them in electronic hobbyist magazines in the 80's and 90's. Those ran several watts and usually at the end of the AM broadcast band and/or around 46/49 Mhz.
What a bizarre find. Lewis, this was well worth your £12 purchase just to see this counterfeit product. I can see suggestions below in the comments for a tear down of these phones. I'm very curious as to how a manufacturer has gone to so much effort to to counterfeit Nokia products and yet get it so wrong that its frightening. Dave Jones of EEVblog would no doubt tear this product down with with A LOT of detail.
Very offtopic, but I think your outro tune (the drum n' bass) that includes the ring modulation is to accent the RINGway of your channel name :D Probably way off though :D
That is some weird stuff. I say test it! What, you don't have a large faraday cage in your basement like everyone else? Or maybe you need a test area a few hundred metres down a mineshaft? 😊
Nope - you're looking for the term "Screen room". Do a google search on that term, you will get links to *actual product* by companies in that business.
I heard from a coworker that he bought cordless phones which he said transmitted several Km back around 2002 in Indonesia. I was pretty skeptical then, but now I suspect something like what is shown in this video is what he was describing. Wow, that is a lot of illegality and deception in one package, especially the handset transmitting on ~115 MHz!
@@AndreDeLimburger 115 MHz would have been allocated internationally to aircraft operations in 2002 and and many decades before. The twist on that is not the frequency which labeling on the product claims it uses. None the less, ignorance doesn’t absolve the owner of any interference caused, probably even in Dubai. Much harshness is likely to come to the unfortunate owner if the device interferes with military TACAN.
Just a dummy load on each would work well enough between rooms, poorly adjusted CB radios can put watts out on this frequency in harmonics without planes falling out of the sky, still you do have to be careful making videos where you purposely do this I agree.
Wow! This is so strange, someone gave me one of these kits a few years ago and it looked identical! Even down to the receipt in the box from Dubai. Someone must've imported a job lot of them at some point in the north of England!
It's stuff like this which makes your channel a perennial favourite Lewis. Well bought, well-described and well-presented. I've come across some egregious fakes in the past but this taking of Nokia's once proud name in vain really is at another level isn't it..?(!)
Lewis, I have some early AMPS kit which you’re welcome to if it’s the kind of thing you’d be interested in? Let me know if you are, and the procedure to get them to you. Another great upload too, good stuff.
I wonder if they were just a scheme to get some mobile use out of a fixed land line - a kind of simple phone patch. Made for a land of loose communication regulations...
There's a nonzero chance they were never a functional product, even brand new out of the box. But that is exactly what this is, a poor man's phone patch.
I have seen these in Australia, I know you said "Nokia never released" but I'm sure in early to late 2000's these were a thing for sure, minus the radio and base station thing I believe
The design of the phone shell certainly was, but those frequencies are no bueno here. Even general handheld scanners rarely covered the 200MHz military bands. Anything outside the UHF CB bands, like 475MHz would need to be strictly licensed. Which again, with UHF CB repeater stations here, these things would make even less sense I'd have to say.
No look inside either of them? Especially the dodgy basestation? If it was around 70gbp in 2002 for both the handsets and basestation, they must have cut all the corners. Yet somehow had good enough duplexers built in, And if you want more fun cordless horror, look up Senao models and then the Harvest made Senao clones. Up to 4W base stations, on 300MHz! People have heard them accidentally uplinking to UHF milsats back in the day.
I did received them too... Popular in Eastern countries. There were mil air band frequencies legal atributions to cordless phones etc in several countries....(I didn't expect that...)
@@jplacido9999 Most models here in the states used FM modulation in the 1.7 MHz (yes, 1700 kHz) transmit for the base station and 49 MHz for the portable transmit ... there were a few cases pursued by the FCC here of those 260 MHz units back in the day too.
re: "People have heard them accidentally uplinking to UHF milsats back in the day." This is not accidental, and its done to this day. There are YT videos on ppl 'working' the milsats too.
Months ago I found and bought one of these at the flea market. Mine is a 6110 clone but branded BAOTONG instead of Nokia! Same battery and telescopic antenna. Only the single handset with no accessories and not in very good condition. Does not turn on at all and I could not find any info online so I didn’t know what it is exactly until now!
AFAIK, my ex-wife -- we're still good friends -- still has our first cellular telephone: A _Motorola Brickphone._ Quite amazing how far cell phones have come in 30-some years.
I could swear something similar came out in the US market. Because I remember looking at a system with a base and two phones with a 1.5 mile range. I do not recall the brand, but for something so absurd. It could’ve been a Radio Shack brand.
I saw one of these at a flea market in Brisbane, Australia in the late 90s (around 1997 or so). As a kid, I didn't have enough money to purchase them, although I desperately wanted to. In retrospect, probably for the best.
have you considered making a faraday cage? To test devices like this without the signal leaving your home/shop. I would be interested in your thoughts on this.
Could these really have been intended as jammers? Given the frequency, it seems likely they could have been used to force air traffic into a more predictable pattern which would make a small team with MANPADS more effective...
it's interesting hearing all abour illegality and intereference , when here where i live literally nobody gives a **** about it. we don't have any airports nearby, but walkie talkie vhf, uhf and wifi is all over the bands. 2ghz wifi links spanning 2.3 - 2.7ghz and 5ghz wifi ptp going well into 6ghz.
Made in Japan (Made in China) Lol I recognized that terrible font on the receiver and the poor deisn of everything else screams Chinese made. I tend to have mixed feelings about Chinese stuff. Some are horrible ewaste garbage but others are really clever like a 6 in 1 SIM card. Imagine having 6 independent SIM cards in on physical SIM card!
I worked for Nokia at the time these must have came out. These are obviously counterfeit, but Nokia *actually* considered real products that could work as walkie-talkies on the ISM/GMRS bands. The key issues were performance, licensing and business model. People expected internal antennas even in the early 2000, which is not playing well with the 70cm bands these would be most likely to operate in. The licensing was and is hard, as millions of PTT capable phones could not only swamp a band and render it useless, but unlike mobile phones, which only transmit on a band when a permitted cellular network allows them, these would transmit when the PTT button is pressed and would be illegal in many places. And thirdly, the mobile phone operators didn’t want to take complaints from users who didn’t understand that some communication goes through the cellular network and some goes direct. PoC (push to talk over cellular) was introduced instead.
makes me wonder how revolutionary beamforming could be for spectrum utilisation.
Did you work in Oulu?
Did anyone actually use PoC?
Is it possible to set up a PoC server currently with some software?
@@transkryption ever heard of wifi6 ?
What are you talking about? These are official Nokia products sold through the Carphone Warehouse even to this day.
You need to learn some facts.
Not a Nokia but a Nok-off.
Yea, he said that.
Paul, that was textbook mate 😂
you wife noks them off.
How about a Nokoffia???
Still better than Notkia.
The phone held by the girl on the box is an old Scandinavian mobile phone used in the old NMT450 network, and the model is Mobira MD59. Fun trivia is that there were eprom images that could be replaced in the phone to turn it into a 70cm ham radio.
I actually have one of those Mobiras, with the custom EPROM. I bought it from the estate of a deceased ham in Kokkola about a decade ago. It has a fault with the LCD, and need to repair it some day.
Germany hams used it a lot.
I tried to modify a similar analog C-Netz 460 MHz mobile phone for the 433 MHz ham band, but at the time it was not possible to get the parts anymore....
Can we please get a teardown, at least of the base unit? There's got to be some really dodgy electronics inside!
I would love to see a guy like Big Clive taking it to bits. Probably some wonky stuff going on in there
@@ebnertra0004 I was just going to say Big Clive
3rd bigclive
@@ebnertra0004 Either Clive or MikesElectricStuff.
Agreed. Or throw it in a faraday cage and give us some output from an SDR. Very curious.
A long LONG time ago I had an actual ""Car Phone" - the first generation cellular type, made by Motorola. I had it moved to my new car from the old and the installer said they had never seen one so big - a massive box under the passenger seat. There was no compatible service in France, but on holiday in Normandy, I found that I could use cells in the Channel Islands while on the Cotentin peninsula about 20 miles away. When I moved across to the D-Day beaches, I was using cells on the Isle of Wight - NINETY MILES away!
Those were real duplexer cans in those original mobile phones. They were a real work of art and pretty much everything you needed for a 5 to 10 watt 900mhz 100% duty cycle repeater. They were powerful. An older 450 mobile telephone full duplex model I converted into a 5 watt repeater and with an antenna at 300 ft used it as the police repeater ;) It worked for them like that for almost 20 years and no one knew what it was... You don't need much power if you have a good location.
@@KlodFather *Correct.*
Woah, VOR gives airplanes a way of flying a particular radial and DME gives distance. You do NOT want to mess with those.
And the weird thing is, those frequencies are used worldwide for aviation. It's not like there's some country where those were CB or amateur bands at the time. Very odd.
Your very own VOR/DME portable!
These are very rarely less than 100khz spaced - so if you're inbetween - say 115.550 - and only doing 12.5Khz, it'll likely never interfere with anything. If it isn't a 11x.x frequency, it'll be 11x.x5 - so still 50Khz spacing. You can hide a lot in plane sight ;)
@@jonathankleinow2073 Unfortunatly there are several countries with cordless phones on uhf air band.
Sometimes they even reached US mil sats and we could ear them in Europe, right from Asian countries or Russia....
Not much on VHF
@@CRCinAU Yeah, assuming these are made competently enough, which I doubt. :D
That area of Dubai still has tons of dodgy stuff for sale. The best place is knaif.
What's especially surprising is that handhelds etc are banned there, so back in the early 2000s everything was heavily controlled.
Real interesting.
As a teenager I added an external ground plane antenna to my 49mhz phone do I could carry the handset on my bicycle around town.
I saw some units that a friend who sold bootleg electronics in Ohio back in the 80's and 90's before he died. He had some units that were better made with large heatsinks that operated on 900 with a vertical collinear antenna. These units we were able to make 10 miles with an antenna on the roof of the car. It was like a bag phone and then the base. These were very illegal and fairly high power. He lived in a trailer so it was like a faraday cage from the antenna pumping out near microwave and many watts. He sold a bunch of these units including his demo. Some time later the FCC came sniffing around looking for him and the phones but he claimed he did not have them or know what they were talking about. They told him that they caught a guy using one and he claimed he bought it from my friend. I told him to lay low and don't import any more. It was one of the craziest things I ever saw. Units could be bought in 900 or 450 or 300 mhz ranges and the frequency could be set with dip switches. Nice find on this set. Its a similar much lower cost version of those original ones I saw back in the late 80's. Loved that video. I had forgotten this stuff and was delighted you discovered it.
I've still got a working 6310i
I went through most of the 5 and 6 series phones in the late '90s and early '00s.
According to a friend of mine who was fighting in the middle east back in 05-07 these long range cordless home phones are very common over there especially since they are far more lax with their frequencys over there
This is really long range lol
Vids a banger. I think I had a 6150 as a mobile.
Probably had good coverage close to the motorways.....
I had bought some very similar looking handsets in the early 2000'S, they had a range of about 10km. They were not marked Nokia but looked the same
This actually looks like a knock off of the Senao SN-6610. If you look into super long range cordless phones, it was Senao who made the majority of them. They were marketed towards 3rd world countries that needed it. PM me if you want more info. Cheers!
We had a 'wave' of these equipments from Senao in countryside Brazil, mostly bought from Paraguay duty free shops by farm owners. They operated around 140-170MHz causing issues with amateur radio, taxi dispatching and public services.
Interesting indeed. When I first saw the 275/475MHz labels, I first thought about what they could interfere with - since the latter of the two is close to the bottom of the current DTV band. Then when you said about 146MHz, I thought it would be close to both FM and DAB services, which may cause interference if the signal is strong enough or the modulator was poor. I didn't know about what was on 115.350MHz but I certainly didn't know it was to do with UK airport communications and the like!
They did use to sell cordless phones (not Nokia branded though) with similar long range capabilities in the 1980's in Japan. I remember my uncle coming back from one of the many annual trips he went on there each year and telling us that you could walk into an electronics store and buy them off the shelf, but they were considered illegal in the United States.
Excellent work removing the antennas and limiting any broadcast range prior to testing... 👍 I would have hated to hear that the channel members were scrambling to bail you out of jail after the "radio police" came skidding up to your place with detector equipment and areials protruding from some official looking government van.
Don't get me wrong: I think we would have posted bail and had you back home in record time, but I know government agencies can be overzealous in their day to day enforcement sometimes.
Reminds me of the Monty Python skit about the cat detector Van. 😂
This was for areas/countrys that didnt have cell phone service and wouldnt be getting it anytime soon back then. So you could walk around your village and shiw off that u had a cell phone....and it worked
The girl looks frustrated on the box. 😂
thing is, everything that is produced needs a market to sell on. the basic idea behind this is the million dollar question.
it would fit into a middle eastern scenario, groups wanting to disturb or monitor aviation and military frequencies. or set up own short range communications with harmless nokia knockoffs.
0:58 Anglia ITV certainly had a good few frequency options 🤣 All the ITV mergers and technology improvements must have saved an absolute fortune 😊
the IR port on the 6150 was on the top of the handset - seen at 4:14 the semi circle black piece at 4:06 was just a little piece of trim, that could be taken off, but there was nothing behind it. I suspect there may have been a plan to make different ones to customise the phone with, but I don't think there was ever anything official.
I still have one somewhere, and after buying a new battery for it a few years ago, it still worked... With an EE sim it showed one2one on the screen .
Such an odd thing! It would be really interesting to see your frequency measurements or a look inside the cases. Thanks for the very interesting video and keep up your great work!
Forget Delboy's dodgy 'statellite' dish... you could quite _literally_ land planes with this!!
4:14 ah, the hallmark of an authentic, quality Nokia product!
back in the early 90s you could get a long range cordless that would do 5 miles. base unit with two large antenna and a long telescopic on the chunky handset... much beloved by farmers
I think that was the Jetphone. There were a small one and a big one. The big one had a range up to 10km.
Great video! That Nokia mobile phone form factor was popular (considered sophisticated) in the Middle East around that time. Dubai is interesting....remember seeing an Airband handheld transceiver on sale in Dubai duty free back in the day (icom if I remember correctly)..and that was one of two/three radios on display, the others being Japanese broadcast receivers!
I wonder how the creators of these came up with *that* frequency. How likely is it someone picks the worst possible frequency *by accident*? If they were operating on the advertised qrgs they might even get the advertised range via some mil UHF sat. ;)
I'm more interested why the basestation has such different frequency to the handsets??
@@rkan2 otherwise it would be very expensive to "duplex" them.
That way it works very well without a fancy duplexer.
Chek cross-band (145/433 MHz Ham repeater)....
Good that you got them off the market!
Those usually worked in 256mhz base and 384mhz headset freq, 40 channels, where very popular in eastern Europe/Russia in the late 90s when cellular service was still extremely expensive.
kerosin520 You are absolutly right....
They sometines would enter US mil sats linear transponders and we could ear them all over the sat coverage (including Portugal)
These "long range cordless phones" used to be a thing here in the Philippines. Sellers advertised it as an alternative to expensive cellular calls back then.
Fascinating, Lewis, and what an odd setup! It's hard to imagine these things ever worked, even wherever they might have been legal. I suppose people will sell anything, cheers!
I got a cheap 2.4ghz walkie talkie set from the dollar store back in 2000, and I could have full on conversations with my grandmother if she used the cordless phone, I could also hear the person she was talking to on the other end of the line, but they couldn't hear me.
Come to think of it I could've been extremely nefarious with it, but I never really cared enough to try aside from the once.
I actually still have one of them somewhere, it's a fake CB unit that was like the "base", I lost both of the walkies though.
Good find, and a bargain for a “cordless” phone collectible for the display shelf.
And if working, a way to interfere with airplanes so that they cannot fly properly...
@@TheSpotify95 airplanes still fly fine without a working DF radio
In the 1990s my FRG7 would accidentally pick up cordless phones around 1.9 khz if I had too much to drink and could not see the frequency readout. Well My next door neighbour a primary teacher was arranging to do things with men that I would never consider, and next door to him, she was telling her mother the chap who came around and stayed last night was the best ever. Only if these analogue phones had more output I might of got a 160m antenna up and been entertained for hours
Eavesdropping.....😂😂😂
Easy to pick up those early analogue cordless phones on a scanner & the next generation ones that operated on 30 - 40 Mhz too!
Back in the days when owning a wideband scanner was a lot of fun!
@@NOWThatsRichy You are right 👍
I had several Nokias back in the day. I believe they were mostly of the 6161i style which had the flip down lid covering the buttons that would also answer and hang up. Nokia and Motorola owned the market from the early 90's through the early 2000's.
Yeah, I even had a Bosch phone too.
a couple of motorollas, but mainy Nokias. 5110, 3210, 3310, 3330 lol
I worked at sea in the early 00s and pilots in ports in the US used something very similar. Had thought they were mobiles at first and then the dude started doing walkie talkie chat on it as well. Was dumbfounded 😂
Crazy piece of kit. I wonder how many were made and are in use today.
In the late 80's there was a HAM radio guy who had a 'cordless' phone rigged up in his car. I don't know how he did it, but he had a regular looking cordless phone and base in his car, a large antenna on the back of his car. He could make calls (called radio stations to demonstrate), I assume it was a radio patch to his house across HAM bands with some sort of device to allow his cordless phone to operate as a handset.
I seem to remember that in the 1990s era you could buy combined phones, which doubled as both a cordless phone when in range of your base station but switched to mobile operation for use anywhere else, further afield. Might have been a Panasonic model.
Man, here in Texas we wouldn't think twice about firing these things up.
A small faraday cage would be an answer to testing them. Wouls love to see you work out the actual specs ^^
Nope. Need a "screen room" they call them. Public mis-uses the term 'Faraday' cage all the time ...
Thank you brother, going to try put this on and relax for some sleep. This channel really does help as it brings me back down to earth at times.
Like it's been said before radio is king, analogue at that. Emf is a thing for sure
You've definetly got a like on this one btw, I don't know why but somehow I had been unsubscribed from your channel yet not even missing a vid.
Things seem a bit funny rn, I'm sure it's just me
In 1998 I got similar fake Nokia from abroad but it was cordless home phone it worked at the radius around 6 miles it interfered with police radio’s of course I didn’t know that till the radio airways eventually found me and taken it off me they didn’t charge me because I cooperated with them they said I am the first person in the uk to have these phone
When they rang me I was at the doctors about a mile away with this Nokia and I talked to them with this Nokia cordless I carried it around in the city centre and people would be surprised and ask me what am I carrying 😊
Interesting. I have never heard about those "Nokia" super long range phones until now. Maybe they were only available in the Middle East. But even then, I thought the aircraft band was an world-wide allocation (including the Middle East). Now I have heard about illegal extended range cordless phones(here in the U.S.). I think I might have seen ads for them in electronic hobbyist magazines in the 80's and 90's. Those ran several watts and usually at the end of the AM broadcast band and/or around 46/49 Mhz.
i wonder if they were made to resemble common nokias for...other reasons..
the mena ebay price offers a clue who would want stuff like this in 2023
You squeezed those dry for all the intel. 👍
What a bizarre find. Lewis, this was well worth your £12 purchase just to see this counterfeit product.
I can see suggestions below in the comments for a tear down of these phones. I'm very curious as to how a manufacturer has gone to so much effort to to counterfeit Nokia products and yet get it so wrong that its frightening. Dave Jones of EEVblog would no doubt tear this product down with with A LOT of detail.
Very offtopic, but I think your outro tune (the drum n' bass) that includes the ring modulation is to accent the RINGway of your channel name :D
Probably way off though :D
That is some weird stuff. I say test it! What, you don't have a large faraday cage in your basement like everyone else? Or maybe you need a test area a few hundred metres down a mineshaft? 😊
Nope - you're looking for the term "Screen room". Do a google search on that term, you will get links to *actual product* by companies in that business.
Cool video bro 💪👍🏻 Could you make a video about the German numbers station G15/G16 operated by the BND
I heard from a coworker that he bought cordless phones which he said transmitted several Km back around 2002 in Indonesia. I was pretty skeptical then, but now I suspect something like what is shown in this video is what he was describing. Wow, that is a lot of illegality and deception in one package, especially the handset transmitting on ~115 MHz!
Illegality? Considering it was bought in Dubai, were these frequencies illegal in the Emirates in 2002?
@@AndreDeLimburger 115 MHz would have been allocated internationally to aircraft operations in 2002 and and many decades before. The twist on that is not the frequency which labeling on the product claims it uses. None the less, ignorance doesn’t absolve the owner of any interference caused, probably even in Dubai. Much harshness is likely to come to the unfortunate owner if the device interferes with military TACAN.
@@wtmayhew TACAN does not use freqs in thew 115 MHz area though, so ...
You need a friend with a EMC anechoic chamber so you can power up things like this safely.
Just a dummy load on each would work well enough between rooms, poorly adjusted CB radios can put watts out on this frequency in harmonics without planes falling out of the sky, still you do have to be careful making videos where you purposely do this I agree.
Screen room. Anybody doing pager repair would have one, a screen room that is ...
this whole product is a fever dream... Big yikes on the handsets tx frequency, good lord. Your very own VOR/DME and TACAN jammer lol
Wow! This is so strange, someone gave me one of these kits a few years ago and it looked identical! Even down to the receipt in the box from Dubai. Someone must've imported a job lot of them at some point in the north of England!
It's stuff like this which makes your channel a perennial favourite Lewis.
Well bought, well-described and well-presented.
I've come across some egregious fakes in the past but this taking of Nokia's once proud name in vain really is at another level isn't it..?(!)
Agreed... OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!! LOL
Surely you can row into the North Sea and do pirate-like activity and never get caught.
Rowing into the North Sea. You'd not only, not get caught but probably wouldn't be seen again. 😂
Though i get your point. 👍
Lewis, I have some early AMPS kit which you’re welcome to if it’s the kind of thing you’d be interested in? Let me know if you are, and the procedure to get them to you.
Another great upload too, good stuff.
Most likely it is a Chinese piece of art)
Was art a typo. Think you ment crap.
I want those, haha I missed out on the old 2 mile distance phones.
The only part of this set that would interest me would be the antenna - for experimental purposes - and maybe the base until for the case only!
As a kid my dream was to make a long range cordless phone
Nokia wasn't made in Japan back then but in Finland.
I wonder if they were just a scheme to get some mobile use out of a
fixed land line - a kind of simple phone patch. Made for a land of loose
communication regulations...
There's a nonzero chance they were never a functional product, even brand new out of the box. But that is exactly what this is, a poor man's phone patch.
this might come handy for surveillance
a video with them in action would be superb
I have seen these in Australia, I know you said "Nokia never released" but I'm sure in early to late 2000's these were a thing for sure, minus the radio and base station thing I believe
The design of the phone shell certainly was, but those frequencies are no bueno here. Even general handheld scanners rarely covered the 200MHz military bands. Anything outside the UHF CB bands, like 475MHz would need to be strictly licensed. Which again, with UHF CB repeater stations here, these things would make even less sense I'd have to say.
I have seen these pop up from time to time on different bands all claiming insane ranges.
No look inside either of them? Especially the dodgy basestation? If it was around 70gbp in 2002 for both the handsets and basestation, they must have cut all the corners. Yet somehow had good enough duplexers built in,
And if you want more fun cordless horror, look up Senao models and then the Harvest made Senao clones. Up to 4W base stations, on 300MHz! People have heard them accidentally uplinking to UHF milsats back in the day.
re: "Yet somehow had good enough duplexers built in,"
With a frequency spread of about 30 MHz, not much of a so-called 'duplexer' is needed.
I did received them too...
Popular in Eastern countries.
There were mil air band frequencies legal atributions to cordless phones etc in several countries....(I didn't expect that...)
@@uploadJ Some would be 256 or 260 MHz (portable) / 49 MHz (Base)
@@jplacido9999 Most models here in the states used FM modulation in the 1.7 MHz (yes, 1700 kHz) transmit for the base station and 49 MHz for the portable transmit ... there were a few cases pursued by the FCC here of those 260 MHz units back in the day too.
re: "People have heard them accidentally uplinking to UHF milsats back in the day."
This is not accidental, and its done to this day. There are YT videos on ppl 'working' the milsats too.
Awesome! I'd love to have one!
The front panel serif font on the base station just screams Chinesium qualify!
racist
Months ago I found and bought one of these at the flea market. Mine is a 6110 clone but branded BAOTONG instead of Nokia! Same battery and telescopic antenna. Only the single handset with no accessories and not in very good condition. Does not turn on at all and I could not find any info online so I didn’t know what it is exactly until now!
you are a flea market as you have fleas.
I would really like to take a peek in that base station. Those dodgy green LEDs on the front panel look very promising.
Leave it with me
We would find similar LRCTs (Long Range Cordless Telephones) in Iraq and Afghanistan. They liked using them to detonate RC-IEDs.
AFAIK, my ex-wife -- we're still good friends -- still has our first cellular telephone: A _Motorola Brickphone._
Quite amazing how far cell phones have come in 30-some years.
I could swear something similar came out in the US market. Because I remember looking at a system with a base and two phones with a 1.5 mile range.
I do not recall the brand, but for something so absurd. It could’ve been a Radio Shack brand.
Nope, never in the US market ...
I saw one of these at a flea market in Brisbane, Australia in the late 90s (around 1997 or so). As a kid, I didn't have enough money to purchase them, although I desperately wanted to. In retrospect, probably for the best.
have you considered making a faraday cage? To test devices like this without the signal leaving your home/shop. I would be interested in your thoughts on this.
yesss drum and bass outro, subsccribed
Could these really have been intended as jammers? Given the frequency, it seems likely they could have been used to force air traffic into a more predictable pattern which would make a small team with MANPADS more effective...
The King will lock you away in the Tower of London if you press the little button with the green phone icon.
Cool video.
Thanks!
it's interesting hearing all abour illegality and intereference , when here where i live literally nobody gives a **** about it. we don't have any airports nearby, but walkie talkie vhf, uhf and wifi is all over the bands. 2ghz wifi links spanning 2.3 - 2.7ghz and 5ghz wifi ptp going well into 6ghz.
Used to see these in Iraq attached to what could be described as the loudest ringers ever conceived by man
Looks exactly like my first phone. Fond memories...
That band listing in the 470hz range is fascinating
That was very interesting! Thanks.👍👍👍
wow how odd!
Crikey! Very cool and interesting find though.
I'd be curious to see how that antenna performs. Where is it resonant?
Difference between us Americans and our UK brethren, someone over hear would have been like I'm making a call with it.
Thanks for your sharing
Made in Japan (Made in China)
Lol I recognized that terrible font on the receiver and the poor deisn of everything else screams Chinese made. I tend to have mixed feelings about Chinese stuff. Some are horrible ewaste garbage but others are really clever like a 6 in 1 SIM card. Imagine having 6 independent SIM cards in on physical SIM card!
racist
They might be handy on an Australian Cattle farm to communicate from a Quad Bike to a Helicopter?.... maybe?
Why? A base station is required with these so-called 'phones'. Better to use a couple 'walkies' on a simplex frequency.
Use a uniden scanner with close call to get the frequencies
I literally told you the frequencies
146MHz and 115.35MHz
@@RingwayManchester 2.5mhz SSB duplex.
Who doesn't own an HP 8590 series SpecAn like a model 8591E?
The Dolphin Tetra link doesn't seem to be in the description? Just FYI
Crazy how this was just five years before the first iPhone.
Love to have a set that was legal to use.
How do you find the military radio frequencies in Australia for example?
just google it
Quality Lewis
Interesting mate, thanks