Everything from 1991 Radio Shack ad I now do with my phone (2014)

For those that are unfamiliar. In short it is a push-to-talk broadcast, public channel, communication. CB stands for Citizen Band.

In Europe, I remember the same frequency, 27 MHz being used for early RC cars. Not sure if EU truck drivers used this too, but it is available and caused runaway RC cars as it was unreliable to use that band. 40Mhz didn't have that issue, but perhaps it was not allowed for regular/unlicensed use...

> there were many attempts to make smartphone apps where you can communicate with people that are physically around you

As someone who has worked in the area: safety was a nightmare, in the sense of "be a woman visible on a distance-based chat".

I'm in the same country. Another big reason to use a CB over a phone is that it's illegal to touch a phone while driving. No such restriction applies to CB radios.

The tech is very much alive and well.

CB radio being closely related to ham radio arguably could be replaced with the Echolink app on your iPhone. Or one of the SDRs like WebSDR or KiwiSDR (listening only)

In theory you could make a Bluetooth 5 app that works like those Cardo motorcycle intercoms (2 to 20 riders on the same conversation over BLE I think). I should look into it.

Not quite CB but similar; as a Ham radio operator, I can do Ham radio on my phone. (EchoLink)

It monitored various emergency and other radio channels used by police, fire department, ambulance service, taxis and so on. The '10 channels' is in reference to how many tuned channels the thing can scan.

Here is some more detail for that particular scanner:

https://www.rigpix.com/rs-realistic/realistic_pro57.htm

Radio frequency scanners are far from obsolete overall but they typically have a lot more channels and scan much faster now. They have continued to evolve or devolve for those that like simplicity. Plenty of people, myself included still have scanners in their home and vehicle. I just had mine on to find out why a parade of ambulance, fire and troopers were going down the highway.

Semi-related because Radio Shack, a store manager taught me how to leverage my "Tandy Service Plan" to get free upgrades on my scanner for life. I was not ready for him to do this. He grabbed my handheld 20 channel scanner by the antenna and smashed it on the desk. Then he handed me a 200 channel scanner because Radio Shack no longer had an equivalent model. Once the 200 channel scanner was obsolete I got a free 1000 channel scanner. Each iteration scanned both channels and stepped frequencies faster. Most scanners lock out particular frequency ranges but this can be bypassed usually by cutting one diode or moving a jumper. Radio Shack preferred the diode method. Nowadays people call this "frequency expansion" or expanded on scanners, ham radio, etc... Some HAM radios can be used as scanners once frequency expanded.

Some now prefer software defined radios to double as scanners. I like both. SDR's are great at home but too much clutter for in the vehicle for me. SDR's combined with leaked keys can monitor P25 encrypted law enforcement tactical channels.

Right, but more specifically they are most often used for scanning stuff like air-band and VHF/UHF two-way radio traffic. Nowadays with a lot of public safety being digital P25 (requiring more expensive scanners) and online streams being so easily available, there's not a lot of reasons to buy a scanner unless you're really passionate about it.

I used a scanner this weekend to listen to the Blue Angels perform. It was also helpful to have their ground crew frequencies in their so we knew that they were a few minutes out from taking off (we watched from a few miles away at a friend’s house with a good view). Scanners are far from obsolete!

Phones especially killed the giftable gadget market.

Department stores and Radio Shacks used to be full of little golf computers and VHS rewinders and electronic Scrabble dictionaries and sports trivia games around Father’s Day and Christmas. It would be unusual in most families, I think, to give someone an app for Christmas.

They’ve also changed our relationship with industrial design. There are probably fewer people designing gadgets, and consumers are less used to acquiring a new device and learning how to use it. I didn’t grow up in a particularly gadgety household, but by the time I was 12 I had learned to work a pretty wide variety of electronics with different interfaces and physical media. Nowadays even your TV is basically a smartphone with a remote.

Some niche gadget-y things that are alive and well in the "a few hundred bucks or less" range:

* hardware tools / multi-tools

* bluetooth speakers

* portable projectors - outdoor big-screen movie night on the cheap

* the "sports/action" camera market - waterproof, magnetic/mountable, go-pro/insta360 etc

* pro/am mirrorless cameras are mostly too expensive to qualify but there's some really cool accesories now (handheld stabilizing gimbals, say)

* everything in the thread/zigbee/etc home automation space (sensors and buttons and automations...)

* car gadgets for enthusiast cars (things that plug into obd ports for diagnostics or real-time display of measurements), or "add android auto to your old car's built-in screen" multi-media retrofits (though in gaining things like this we've lost the ease of just things being single- or double-DIN in the first place), or dashcams

* vr headsets (feels very much like the sort of thing Radioshack of old would've been all over like the tiny handheld TVs)

* fitbits and such wearables

* portable monitors

* mechanical keyboards (as well as macro pads and such)

a lot of them qualify as "phone accesories" but I'm not sure that takes away from them

Or have gadgets become incredibly cheap? 99 cent iPhone apps etc?

I'm still falling in love with dedicated devices.

My Sony digital camera is still a lot of fun (so are my medium- format film cameras for that matter). Of course the phone is the camera I always have on me.

I have plenty of other dedicated devices but I'm kind of lazy to think about them, list them. (A digital 12-channel recorder/mixer just jumped to my mind though.)

In music, phones also killed metronomes and tuners which I'm thrilled about because by themselves those are $30+ instead of $1 (or free with ads) for an app

Crypto coin is the next best thing to cash, I would say that it's in the bag if you use a wallet on your phone, although it could be argued.

Waze works great once there's a critical mass of other drivers—busy roads in populated areas. My radar detector fills in the gaps on back roads and small towns very well.

I thought the same but then I realized the post is from 2014, so maybe not at the time

For fixed radars, at least down here in Brazil, RadarBot is a lot better than Waze. For cops on the side of the road, maybe Waze can be better. RadarBot updates it's list of fixed spees cameras really fast.

Phones in Japan used to receive actual TV. Well, slightly different, but still directly from the waves rather than the internet. Phones used to receive AM and FM, too.

Not forgetting the humble home phone, and car phone.

In some ways one could also include a Game Boy in that list!

Let’s have some fun with this:

Newspaper

Classifieds

Phone book

Rolodex

Photo album

ATM?

Health tracker?

Translator

Dictionary

Thesaurus

Notebook

Scanner

Compass

Flashlight

Sears catalog?

Meh, I'd rather had been born to same parents but as a USA boomer baby.

How/why would it be banned, if all it did was provide emulated 'channels' for shared voice comms among users in a local geographic area?

Came here to say this. There's nothing like a CB radio or the mentioned scanner on a phone. (Scanner apps are streaming from actual scanners in the real world somewhere).

We're on the verge of another consolidation, where laptops and tablets become dumb shells for phones. (Exceptions: "hardcore" gaming, software development, content creation.) But yes, there's less to capture.

That's hardly surprising no ? These 'revolutions' only happen once every few decades, and looking back everything looks insignificant (because their significance shrinks to nothing when you're at the wake of the exponential function).

If you look back there's basically "nothing" that happened till the 90s; and if widen the horizon a bit and look back 'nothing' appears to have happened till the 20th century and so on.

We grow in ability, not wisdom (which is why 'forgetting' is so much more catastrophic).

I think the only explanation is that Steve Jobs was some kind of god, or extraterrestrial visitor.

You write 10 but isn’t it a lot closer to 20 years by now?

Those are two different use cases for me. A radar detector is much more specific. Waze replaces the usefulness of other drivers flashing their lights at me.

Anecdotally, people rarely seem to do that today for whatever reason. I expect at this point people think I'm either trying to cuss them out or complain about how bright their headlights are today, but if you see me flashing my lights there is a cop ahead looking for tickets.

They don’t really have the right frequencies available. In the GHz range they operate point to point comms at ground level with low powered radios wouldn’t be a great experience except for if you were so close to someone you could practically shout at them.

Amateur Radio and GMRS though are still very much things that will give good performance for those use cases. GMRS requires a “license” but no skill is required, just payment to the FCC.

Ham radio or GMRS are still great options for remote areas or at crowded venues where nobody can get cell service because everything is overloaded.

Ignoring the frequencies for a moment, because physics, the phone does 'wi-fi' calling just fine, a 40 'channel' (or 'room') push to talk (or VOX) voice app is pretty trivial. You get close just running the discord client on your phone. That _does_ require WiFi, but _doesn't_ require a cell tower. So modally, totally doable from a WiFi network, if your making your own WiFi network then yeah, you need a cell tower.

There are a lot of things our phones are capable of that we are not able to get them to do.

Even before the iPhone I had a phone with front and rear cameras and Bluetooth, it has long since been replaced and is probably sitting at the back of a drawer somewhere. If I had the ability to make it work as a Bluetooth webcam it might have had a productive second life. It was physically capable of doing this, just not software capable

Walkie talkies require a lot more power than smartphones have. FRS is 2W, ham radio handhelds are usually 5W, smartphone Wifi is 30mW. They also require a long antenna sticking out the top. Smartphones have UHF range antennas so possible to fit them but won't be as good.

What is disappointing is that LTE Direct and 5G Peer to Peer didn't go anywhere. They do LTE or 5G directly without towers. The range is 1km, not walkie talkie distance, but enough for a lot of things. There are some first responders phones with but it doesn't seem to be available for public.

Bitchat might interest you. It just uses Bluetooth for a local mesh.

Which means it’s time to update the current value!

In 2025 it would be $7,245.62.