In older movies you sometimes see the police or detectives using car phones...?

Question

How did these operate at a time when we didn't have satellite communications or cell phone systems in place?

I often thought that it was merely radio ... but if that were the case, why a bulky large-handled phone receiver instead of the traditional compact hand mic??

Answer 1

it was radio see when you watched these movie classics.....you would have heard the dispatcher say you have a phone call .. and they would say put them through...that was called a phone pach.  we here in the ham world still use them today.. not as much as back then since the invention of cell towers. they were so big like real phones because would you want someone listening to you conversation's?   neither did they ...back then and they didn't have phase loop locking as known as pll or private line  

any more detail you need  ..email me

Answer 2

Back then, it was like a walkie-talkie that you can get today, with one big antenna someplace in the city connected to the phone company, which broadcasted all around, and the "car phone" had to be pretty powerful to communicate back to it (so it was heavy and needed a car battery to run it).  The whole city could have 10 or 11 calls going on at once, so there couldn't be too many people trying to call one another, and all calls went back and forth on that one huge antenna.  Inlike a regular walkie-talkie radio, you could talk and listen at the same time, so you didn't need to hit a button to talk, and unlike a regular radio, the calls had to go through the phone company instead of to another radio.  It was all very expensive, so its use was very limited.

Of course now, instead of one big antenna, there are thousands of small antennas, each with its own particular area (called a cell, which is why they call it a cellular system).  Each antenna can handle hundreds of calls at the same time, and if you move away from one cell and into another, the system automatically switches you over to a closer antenna, so your signal doesn't fade as you move around.