You're most welcome, TermsakC. I'm clueless on the air travel but you got good answers already. With as much as I've seen and heard over the last several years, if it were me I'd call ahead to the airline I was flying on and get their input before arrival. Better safe than sorry and sometimes airlines have slightly different rules than the general federal ones. Probably safest inside the flashlight body and insulating paper for one end is smart...then just put it where they allow or require I guess. In the backpacking/hiking world people had lots of problems and erratic results for simple items like collapsible hiking poles, tent stakes, small stove burners, etc. even though all of those were clearly discussed in the general rules.
Did you have a good quality CDMA smart phone and have since sold it for a better phone? If you still have yours, itās now too late. It seems that all major cellular carriers that supported CDMA (Verizon, Sprint(T-Mobile)) are no longer accepting CDMA activations AND they are phasing out CDMA support in 2022. T-Mobile in Jan, Verizon in Dec.That meansā¦ any CDMA phone will no longer be able to work with cellular networks. Smart phones at least can use WiFi. But older flip phones? Now JUNK. Uselessā¦ well, except for things like travel alarms! I have an old LG Lotus that was an amazing little QWERTY flip phone with dual LCDās and dual speakers. Really nice sound for its size. Back when the only way to get sound files available for ringtones required the file to be sent via the cellular network, I had loaded quite a few good ones. I use that as a backup travel alarm and itās terrific. Otherwiseā¦ now that thing wonāt even be able to make Emergency Callsāno network visible at all.
I appreciate the heads up X, but could use more info please!
If this is true, I would have expected some type of notification from Verizon by now, if not months ago! How did you learn of this rather major development?
Is the phase-out period supposed to only begin this coming January, or be completed? If it's just the beginning, does your source provide a scheduled completion date?
Hopefully the rumor about the iPhone 13 having satellite capability is true. Maybe thatāll become cheaper than the regular carriers with Muskās satellites or something.
I had an old LG Prime (original, not the 2) that I loooooooved. Sleek, disappeared in a pocket, worked like a champ, wonderfully dumb.
Got notice late in the year (early November??) that it was no longer gonna be supported by AT&T by the end of the year, and that I had to get a newer one or lose service come January.
Literally on the 31st I caught a sale on AT&T phones that was expiring that day, got a Zsomething (poopooed brand owned by ChiComs, forgot offhand, damn), and no time to trek on out to the AT&T store, so ordered one online to get my foot in the door.
Came like 2wks later, played musical phones for that 2wks ātil I got it.
Point being, if youāre on their email list, youāll get notice there, usually 1-2mos before the cutoff.
Several tech websites have indicated this, like The Verge. Jan 2022 is for T-Mobile. Actually, with Verizon itās end of 2022. LINK. And of course, Verizon has confirmed this as well, HERE.
Yeah, I believe the satellite connection is more like an emergency beacon like some survival watches have as apposed to being able to make a phone call through the satellite link. Actual sat phones are quite large and expensive.
Hmmā¦ excellent points. I wonder why no one has figured out a way to bypass cell towers to either transmit data and voice directly to other devices or even form a mesh network. My iPhone obviously has the ability to send/receive data using 4g and 5g frequencies to/from a tower thatās miles away.
The distress beacon things (Personal Locator Beacon) doesnāt have the bandwidth for voice calls. It only sends your GPS coordinates. I donāt know why they didnāt make it also able to include some text from you: maybe to stop people from using it for chatting. But it looks like the rumor was false and the iphone 13 wonāt have any sort of satellite comms. The last msg of this thread has a link with details:
Ming chi later clarified that the satellite use would be only for emergencies and only when there was no cell signal. It would not be a satellite phone.
Its all still rumors as there has been no official reports on the feature.
Iāve seen a lot of folks on BLF discussing LED and driver design, implementation, measurements, etcā¦. and it has me wondering how many of them are professionals like engineers or tradesmen who are in the industry and how many are just hobbyists/enthusiasts who have just learned via DIY. Anyone here have a feel for that?
Ok, this sounds like a PLB and I guess it makes some sense. Too bad they can no longer use the headphone cord as an antenna, since they got rid of the headphone jackā¦
Some like Barkuti and Tom E used to work as engineers for big electronics companies and Lexel trained as an electronics engineer. Toykeeper was a software coder.
I think the flashlight specific field is too small and specific so you get these knowledgeable people from larger adjacent fields who like flashlights that find it easy to learn driver design and firmware coding. Iām pretty sure 99% of the forum members just pick up things here and there and get a good feel for it. The number of people that can design their own driver is quite small. Maybe 10 or 15 people? Maybe 20?
Anyway, thats my guess.