Motorola Unleashes New High-End Phones
Quadband
Even if we are homebodies, most people eventually go somewhere where they need to call home, and if that's out of the U.S. then why not already have the capability built in?
Rich?
1. The first reason is antennas. Practically all modern GSM phones - especially tri-band ones - technically have quad-band radios, it's just the antenna that's not quad, and the firmware is set to match the antenna.
It's really hard to design a single antenna that tunes equally well to all four bands. Nokia, with their huge R&D budget and small army of engineers, has yet to come up with a quad-band antenna that meets their internal standards on all four bands. Believe me, they're working on it, they just don't have it yet.
I don't know whether Motorola's standards are lower or their engineers are more talented, but regardless, they have designed an antenna that meets their reception standards. Most oth...
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When I asked a Nokia spokesperson why they don't make quad-band phones, that exactly what he told me.
-- Don
ltxi said:
He's BSing you. As far as the antenna goes, closer makes it easier. ...
Could you elaborate? Are you an RF engineer?
I really don't think it's BS. If you look at a tri-band internal antenna, it's really not much more than a three-pronged sheet of specially-shaped thin metal. The length of each of the three sections is what makes that part "tuned" to a particular band.
Each band is a range of frequencies. Each antenna part has to resonate across the whole range of its band, but not the other bands.
There aren't separate antennas for each band - all phones I've ever seen have only one "wire" for the whole antenna, regardless of the number of bands, and it's the antenna design that causes ...
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As to "I've never seen a GSM 850/900/1900 phone" Nokia 6200 and the North American versions of most later Nokia phones exchange 900 for 850.
Not rocket science, trust me.
-- Don
You needed at least two power amplifiers and some pretty complex front end circuitry. I don't know of any vendors of RF integrated circuits that actually made quad band transceivers most were just tri-band, meaning a potentially more complicated and expensive RF front end.
As vendors see the demand they will integrate RFICs to supply quad band transceivers. The DSP (baseband is not a problem here). Ditto for the PA (power amplifier vendors) and then you'll see more supply of phones.
Mot may have cooperated with their own chip unit (now freescale) to come up with quadband support for a unique market fitting.
Part of quadban...
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