Building your own mobile base station. Is it possible

[Shalmanese]

I was tinkering with some wireless AP's and thinkning about how cool some of the apps could be when I realised that there was already an existing infrastructure perfectly designed for some of those apps. Would it be possible in anyway to create a base station for a mobile phone without spending exorbiant amounts of money?

There are some really cool apps that I can think of straight away:

1. land line call charges when your at home

2. Effectively a walky talky for anybody else who is also in the house

3. Link it up to ICQ and you can get an SMS whenever anybody goes online/sends you a message.

4. Hook it up to some monitoring gear and you can have a nice mobile command centre.

5. Use it as a universal remote control.

 

[drag]

ya sure, it be easy, um sort off. Well it would be easy, ecxept for the governemt deciding it needed 90% of the usefull bandwidth empty for itself. First off ya need to get a liscence for powerfull brodcasts, then ya need to add a big powerfull booster to your wireless nic card. OR you can skip the whole liscencing support thing and go and convince all your neighbors how cool would it be to convert to VoIP communications and get them to help you set up a wireless relay system.

I know a company that specializes in highspeed internet for small towns. They go and stick a wireless router antenna, just like you buy in a store for your living room, on top of a pole in the center of town and run a t1 line to it from the big city and charge people wireless access to it. They just set up wireless antennas on their roofs and whalla a entire town with a 11Mbit wireless backbone and a T1 to the internet. Now mind you these are towns with less than 20,000 people living in them max, and out in the country you can actually get really good widespread coverage using street legal gear. If it was any more powerfull than that then every custumer would be required to get FCC liscences to transmit back to it...

isn't government grand? get 80% avaible bandwith for it's own use and charge people and hold broadcasting liscences over the head of media and cell phone operators for the next 15%, microwaves and disturbances cloud the next 3% and the last bit is left over for cordless phones, wireless networks, shortwave, cb radio, and other insudry uses for the "masses". I probably don't have the percentages right, but it realy is that bad. you think a arangement made in the 1940's would be up to review. nope not important enough! FCC knows the more f-d up job they got to do the more money and power they are going to need to acomplish it, plus helping cell phone companies get a strangle hold on long range electronic transmissions for the average person can have it's own benefits.

You could just give up and get a CB radio, that comes close to fitting the bill, and illigally boosting the power is pretty easy. And get a radio modem for 300 bucks and get 14000 baud for email, pretty good actually for text transmissions.

 

[damonpip]

Many companies in China already make something like this, there's a bunch of differesnt ones, but they're basically cell phones that have a base/antenna at your house and plug into the phone line. I thought about getting one, they only cost about $300 shipped from China (they sell "samples"). Only problem is that they're illegal here in the US, and I didn't feel like worrying about that. They're really cool though, and the newer ones look and work exactly like the small new nokias (dont remember what model # though)

 

[Shalmanese]

Sure, technically they are illegal but what are the chances of somebody catching you? If you make it low powered enough so that it only broadcasts within about 50m or so, I doubt they will find you.

 

[Mark R]

You can buy 'picocellular' base stations. These have extremely low powered transmitters, and are used in small high-density areas; e.g. shopping malls and airports

This one is about the size of a laptop:
http://www.nokia.com/networks/product_catalog/pc_product_datasheet/1,5562,,00.html?prod_id=RAS00010&path=mcat&mcat=44445&scat=48260&tech_id=&range_id=&query=

I'm sure it will be tricky to hook it up to a private network, but I suspect that will be a lot easier than trying to build the radio end yourself.