NewtonTalk.net June 2009 archive: Re: [NTLK] Cellular modem and

From: Ed Kummel <tech_ed_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Thu Jun 04 2009 - 15:10:52 EDT

A bunch of years ago, the company I worked for at that time rented a Planet 1 satelite phone system (looked like a laptop with the antenna flipping up like a laptop display) to an (artic or antartic?) expedition...I can't remember which pole it was...But you probably remember it..it was the one where one of the scientists had to be rescued because of a medical problem...and there was a chance of the scientist dying? I think it was a woman scientist..again, my memory is a little fuzzy about the details.
Buy anyway, we sent them out with the satelite phone, and a Newton 2000.
The satelite phone worked perfectly fine with the Newton...I believe that we used a Motorola Montana modem and a special cable....or it may have just been the standard RJ11...But we did have dozens of special cables for these PC card modems...There was one expedition in Hawaii where they wanted to monitor the movment of hardened lava fields, so they used a Newton and an Oki 900 cellphone connected with their equipment (I put together a custom RS232 to RS422 interface so that their equipment could talk to the Newton) Multiple times per day, the Newton would collect data from their equipment, and once per day, the Oki would wake up, dial a number and the Newton would send the data. This all ran on 2 motorcycle batteries and a solar panel for almost 2 months...until a skylight broke open on the lava field and lava took the whole thing! The scientists liked this setup because of it's extremly low power requirements. And everything was off the
shelf parts exepct for my serial port converter...which was a simple device I got from one of the big name electronics companies...
Anyway, back in the day, I had Newtons talking to everything...I had particularly good success with the packet radio systems. I used Ardis packet radios but they were huge and clunky and the batterys didn't last very long. I also used this PC card device that had a distinctive gold colored entending antenna...AllPoints I think it was called? When Wynd left the communications arena, I was able to get the card to work on another system, DTS was the name of the company...found out from the software developer for the device that a triple tap on a secret word in the "about" screen would put you in the super secret configuration section...the only triple tap I've every seen on the Newton! For over a year, this DTS account was my major email address using my Newton and a keyboard as my primary connection to the internet!
And once during a tradeshow in Atlanta, I talked to a bicycle policeman at the show who had equipped their bicycle force with CDMA packet radios and Newtons...using the Newton Dongle connector as the interface (I'll bet that didn't last long). I was able to replicate their configuration and used it quite a bit.
I remember one particular interesting interaction with HP when they came by our offices to show off their new PDA...The HP300 and 320 clamshell devices. While they were busy showing off everything their devices could do, I had a barcode scanner, AllPoints card on my Newton 2000 and scanning inventory trying to track down a missing device...The HP guy asked me what the handheld I was using. When I showed him it was just an ordinary Newton, he didn't believe me that it was doing what it was doing (I was running FileMaker for the Newton to connect to our FMP database)
Needless to say, I proceeded to show him what a Newton could do and finished with a vocalization demo where the Newton touted it's own virtues in it's own voice...the HP rep left defeated...
Don't get me wrong, I love the LX200 device from HP...I still have one (don't use it anymore though) and the OmniGo was a sweet device! but the LX300 and 320 clamshell devices were junk...
Anyway...sorry for the rambling here.
Ed
web/gadget guru
http://newton.tek-ed.com (download Newton packages)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Richard Feynman, Physicist, Nobel winner (1918-1988)
"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."

--- On Thu, 6/4/09, Scott Hoffman <hoffo@mac.com> wrote:

From: Scott Hoffman <hoffo@mac.com>
Subject: Re: [NTLK] Cellular modem and phone-to-modem questions
To: newtontalk@newtontalk.net
Date: Thursday, June 4, 2009, 1:09 AM

Linking a satellite phone with a Newton would be really cool - truly
around-the-world capability! I could imagine something like that did
exist at one time... there were adventurers in the mid-90s who
thought of that undoubtedly. Was anything actually developed?

On Jun 3, 2009, at 5:38 AM, SteveC wrote:

> Another nice angle would be sattellite phone connectivity (I think
> already dicussed on this e'list over the last year). I think the
> technology moves slower than cellular and the digital speed would
> defnitely be slower than cellular (with high latency at that) so it
> might be more in the Newt's capability range.
>
>
>
> --
>
> _sc
>
>

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