AT&T - mobile phones for the 1950s

AT&T experimented with a mobile phone service in the late 1940s but this was limited by infrastructure and channel availability. How far might this progress with the advent of transistors if the company were sufficiently motivated? What might change in the 1960s or 1970s if car-based or primitive hand-held telephones were widespread?
 
AT&T experimented with a mobile phone service in the late 1940s but this was limited by infrastructure and channel availability. How far might this progress with the advent of transistors if the company were sufficiently motivated? What might change in the 1960s or 1970s if car-based or primitive hand-held telephones were widespread?

Problem was transistors were nowhere powerful enough for for RF links, have use tubes, and the circuit for spread spectrum would need an impressive amount of them, so you would have very broad channels, and assigned channels, crystal tuned
The tech to make small radio telephones that stayed in tune means all other technology gets bumped up to '70s level, a 20+ year jump.
 
Even with transistors, it took decades for a car phone to come into being and later the personal mobile phone to come into being. And even then, it was shockingly expensive. It took decades for them to be affordable by the middle class, let alone something everyone now has.
 
Till then it's ordinary radios. Those were available in the 1950s & widely used in commercial applications. We used the cheap 'walkie talkie' radios when the family went fishing in the early 1960s.
 
Till then it's ordinary radios. Those were available in the 1950s & widely used in commercial applications. We used the cheap 'walkie talkie' radios when the family went fishing in the early 1960s.

I would have thought you would have had better luck with worms, or flies, but, whatever works.
 
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