Installing an old style mobile telephone, in your 1966 Imperial
Q. I want to put in an old style mobile telephone in my 1966 Imperial. I have some parts, namely the control head which contains the dial. Any ideas how I could use that unit to control a cellular telephone?
A. From Geoff Fors, mobile telephone expert:
"I am an Imperial nut. I have had a '67 Crown HT since 1979 which I rescued from the crusher and still regularly drive. It still has a Motorola 'MJ' rotary dial IMTS head in it along with the complete 1966 vintage IMTS radio which I used up until 1995 when Pacific Bell discontinued IMTS service."
"I always liked the looks of the '66 Imperial better than the '67. I plan on getting a black '66 4 door hardtop someday. Any car good enough for Bruce Wayne (Batman) and the Man from U.N.C.L.E. is good enough for me!"
[1966 Imperial pictured below]
"Here's what one guy did regarding your idea. At one time Motorola made a cellular interface which was designed to take a regular mobile cell phone and interconnect it to a standard desktop home telephone. This product was sold mainly to construction companies and mobile offices who wanted a regular telephone but were too far from a conventional phone line. This product dated from about 1989 and plugged into a port on a transportable or installed mobile phone. The guy who had this idea rewired the IMTS control head so that it behaved as a regular home phone (he added the network and some parts from a Trimline telephone.) Then he just wired the interface box to it and there was a cell phone in the trunk."
"Here's the problem with that idea in 2004 - nobody to my knowledge makes an installed mobile cell phone anymore and the carriers will not activate an analog phone anymore either (at least in my area.) You can't buy a transportable phone anymore. So a person doing it today would need to start from scratch. I presume that most modern cell phones have an accessory port (unfortunately, usually undocumented to the public.) What would be needed would be an interface box to amplify and re-route audio from a cell phone into the IMTS control head, and to convert hook switch and dial pulses into commands the cell phone understands. There is a moderate amount of programming involved in doing so, because the cell phone wants to see a 'send' command when you are finished dialing and the IMTS phone has no such provision. That means you would need a program subroutine that would understand certain digits to determine when to engage the 'send' line and when to wait for the next dialed digit. It's probably too big a program to fit in a basic stamp type microcontroller but certain PICs or other microcontrollers might be able to handle the number of conversions needed. As you can see, it's not that simple a project."
"I miss having the IMTS service and have left my fully operational phone in the Imperial out of nostalgia. But I haven't found a cheap solution for still using it other than buying a defunct IMTS base station and running that illegally from my house, another big project which is impractical also."
"If all you have is the control head and no radio, you could always rewire the switches, make an interface board, and use a dial-pulse to contact closure logic circuit, and Frankenstein all that into a cell phone built inside the head itself. But again, the new cell phones are a throw-away item made with surface mounted and proprietary parts, and hacking into one would be not be easy."
"The dual IMTS/Cellular phones Tom mentions were from 1989-90 and are far newer than anything which would look right in the Imperial."
"A final, simpler idea. It wouldn't be much work to patch the IMTS head into the hands-free accessory line of a cell phone. But your dial wouldn't work, and you would have to still use the cell phone to access various modes such as 'send' and 'end.'"
Geoff
