Recommissioning Vintage Mobile Phones

It seems that's a 1G analogue phone:

I had one of them in the mid 90's Motorola digiflip full size card slid in the bottom .....pig of a thing too big for your pocket .....

looks digital

I suspect the frequency bands it used will have beeb re-allocated, but I've been out of touch with that side of life for over 25 years.

That is going to take some work :-)

Since that is an ETACS analogue phone and there are no networks for it to talk to any more, you will need to convert it to digital.

I think the approach I would take is to rip out the contents of it, and replace them with a small microcontroller dev board and a modern GSM module. Use the microcontroller to interface with and scan the keypad, and to drive the display (which might also be worth replacing with a modern OLED i2C module if you want it to look flash), and hand off the actual call handling to the GSM module.

That is probably the least of the problems...

ISTR that the microtac and startac etc used full sized sim cards (i.e. credit card sized, which pretty much used the whole footprint of the phone to accommodate it) - however that will be a moot point in this case as you are not going to be re-using the existing circuitry.

So in short it's a non-starter, then. Pity! I'm sure there would have been many more years left in it from the durability PoV. Thanks, all.

Yes but it would be very low on security, and may well interfere or be interference for, the normal digital stuff. I do remember that the analogue network was just over 1ghz, since you could easily receive them on a scanner back in the day. Brian

just another example of technology squandering the worlds resources ...

Perhaps you're getting mixed up with the old cordless analogue home phones of that time, Brain? 'Twas good fun back then listening in on other people's conversations. ;-) --

"Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists."

- The Communist Manifesto, Marx & Engels

If it's analogue, there won't be a SIM!