mobile phones are easy, in 50s some of people would be familiar with (ww2 era) military radios that could transmit voice, just explain that you don’t need to carry entire backpack of radio equipment, everything fits in this small device
range 1500km, this is completely doable on standard amateur radio equipment, you just need few hundred watts of power
this is what happens when you’re too close to an antenna handling power like that (lifted from reddit):
A few years ago, when I lived in-town, I had an issue. I came home from work one evening and immediately began to tune up the radio so that I might work some grey line DX when I noticed that my tuner was having difficulty tuning within the 20m DX window. I reset and again, it failed. I looked out the window and noticed, to my horror, that some moron had decided to hang laundry from my 80m dipole.
Quickly, I realized that the culprit must have been my neighbor who had a habit of using or taking my property without asking. I gathered his laundry in a basket, walked next door, dropped it on the doorstep and went back home. Just to be sure that he got the memo, I dropped a handwritten note atop the laundry which basically read “That’s not a clothesline, it’s an antenna. This antenna will have 100-200W (TS-480HX) on it, so don’t touch it! Contact with the antenna will result in terribly painful RF burns- no kidding. Don’t touch the antenna. Don’t hang things from the antenna. Don’t come on my property.”
Not wanting to get sued by some payday-seeking jerk (many of those in this area), I tied lengths of Caution tape to the legs of the dipole to act as a visual warning.
Guess what? Halfway through a conversation with a delightful ham in Brazil, I heard intense screaming from the backyard. I ran to the back window and found my selfish, moronic neighbor holding his forearm where it had contacted the dipole as he tried to rehang his wet laundry.
He threatened to call the police, so I just called the sheriff, who happened to be the local ARC president. Threatened with a Criminal Trespassing charge, the neighbor let it go and never returned to my yard. On the plus side, all of my missing tools were mysteriously returned within a few days, too.
To wrap up this ramble, I felt bad about him being injured, so the sheriff and I paid him a visit to check on his progress over the subsequent couple of months. It wasn’t quite as bad as he had asserted and he did recover. I have since moved to avoid yahoos such as him.
I believe @skillissuer is pointing out that in order to broadcast the 1500km that Dick Tracy’s watch was said to have would require a ton of power. That power would make it dangerous to have on your wrist. That’s just what I pieced together through context though.
yeah sorry if it was unclear. this problem is avoided by talking to some other station, usually GSM tower or satellite. when you don’t have this luxury, you need high power, large antenna array or you get lower range
mobile phones are easy, in 50s some of people would be familiar with (ww2 era) military radios that could transmit voice, just explain that you don’t need to carry entire backpack of radio equipment, everything fits in this small device
and also we managed to reduce power use few thousand times, and we use frequencies some 1000x higher than these old radios, up to 15000x if we insist
There was also Dick Tracy and his 2-way wrist radio.
oof ouchie
have you ever seen a RF burn?
I don’t think that was a feature of Dick Tracy’s wrist radio.
range 1500km, this is completely doable on standard amateur radio equipment, you just need few hundred watts of power
this is what happens when you’re too close to an antenna handling power like that (lifted from reddit):
Ok… what does that have to do with a fictional wrist radio in a comic strip?
I believe @skillissuer is pointing out that in order to broadcast the 1500km that Dick Tracy’s watch was said to have would require a ton of power. That power would make it dangerous to have on your wrist. That’s just what I pieced together through context though.
Ah, that does make sense. It was very unclear to me.
yeah sorry if it was unclear. this problem is avoided by talking to some other station, usually GSM tower or satellite. when you don’t have this luxury, you need high power, large antenna array or you get lower range
Mobile phones as phones—yes, maybe that’s easy. But that we don’t actually use them to TALK to people would be weird.
explain that as portable fax machines. google search or any social media would be a complete mystery however