Bags & Carry Cases

The Motorola Bag Phone was a portable Cellular Telephone manufactured by Motorola, inc. from 1992-2000. more...

Home
Apple Accessories
Adapters
Bags & Carry Cases
$1 - $25
$25 - $50
$50 - $100
$100 - $200
$200 - $500
$500 - $1000
$1000 - $2000
Cables & Connectors
Manuals
Other
Skins & Protectors
Speakers & Headphones
Apple Components
Apple Desktops
Apple Laptops & Notebooks
Apple Networking
Apple Printers, Scanners...
Other
Vintage Apple

Description

Motorola's line of powerful, rugged cell phones went on sale in 1992 for approximately $200. These phones put out 3 watts of power (as opposed to 0.6 watts that todays cell phones output) which makes them popular for truckers, boaters, and people in rural areas. Because of their durability, many of these phones are still in use today.

The Bag Phones are a derivative of the Motorola 4500X, 4800X, and 5000X that proved popular in Europe, as well the American version, the Motorola "Tough Talker". These phones featured handsets attached to trancievers and battery backs, and had optional carry cases. By downsizing the equipment, Motorola was able to make them more marketable, and hence the Bag Phone.

These phones consist of a handset with a black & white LCD display with InUse (indicating that a call is in progress), NoSvc (cannot receive a cellular signal and is unable to make or receive calls), and Roam (accessing a cellular system other than your home system) indicators, a numeric keypad with other buttons for different functions (depending on the model), and a separate speaker for the ringer and hands-free use. This plugs into the tranceiver (the heart of the phone), which plugged into that is a "rubber duck" antenna, and the power supply connector which plugs into a 12 volt automotive outlet. (A 12 volt lead-acid battery that connects to the power supply, providing 2 hours of talk time and 2 days of standby time, was also available.) All of these parts are conveniently put together in a leather case specially designed for Motorola Bag Phones by Caseworks, inc. of Chicago. These phones can also be permanently installed in a car.

Cellular system

Because these are analog-only phones, they operate only on the slowly disappearing AMPS network. As for now, this is no problem for the phones' 3 watt output. During the late 90s, though, Motorola produced very few special edition digital bagphones. They were dual mode AMPS/TDMA phones marketed as the "Digital Concert Series."

Styles and Model List

Although they are technically all the same, Motorola produced about a dozen different handset styles of the bag phone. These can usually be determined by the SCN***** model number on the handset. Each type of handset also had its own version of tranceiver. Random handsets can be used with random transceivers, but some mismatches may result in unusable functions. For example, plugging a 4500 handset into a 3 Button tranciever will result in the Up/Down and VOL The handset types are as follows:

Read more at Wikipedia.org