Signing Up for a Free US or UK Number

If you’d rather not own a mobile phone, you can at least get your WiFi-enabled laptop or PDA its own telephone number so you can receive calls from anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection. It basically involves signing up for a free redirection service that routes calls made to an ordinary telephone number to your VoIP client. Some details at the J Spot.

  1. Sign up for an account with FWD.
  2. Download and install an FWD-compatible client.
  3. Sign up for a free DID number from IPKall (US) and/or CallUK.

The catch is, you have to be online (and have to have a headset or a laptop with a mic ready) to receive calls. However, you can activate the free FWD voicemail to pick up when a call is unanswered or when you are offline. Messages will then be sent to your email as .MP3 files.

If you’re running an offshore business that caters to US or UK clients, this might come in handy. You can even route these calls to your office PABX so you can receive calls as if you had your own US number.

You can probably even get free (or at least cheap) incoming phone calls this way, if your mobile phone supports internal VoIP clients connected either via GPRS, 3G or WiFi.

August 24th, 2006 Posted by J. Angelo Racoma in Tips and Tricks, Hacks at 10:37 pm Comment Now! »

Using a Directional Antenna to Improve GSM/UMTS Reception

It’s 2006 but sad to say, thre are still some places where you get dead spots on your mobile phone. It’s either you’re too far away from the cell site, or you’re in an area too densely situated with infrastructure (in other words, a concrete jungle).

Graeme blogs about using a homemade biquad WiFi antenna to boost reception, or more accurately to get a signal where there was none at all.

I realised that there really isn’t much difference in operating frequency between WiFi (around 2.4Ghz) and UMTS (2.1Ghz). And there are loads of different clandestine WiFi antenna ideas floating around the Internet. If I could find an easy-to-build directional WiFi antenna, perhaps I could reverse-engineer its dimensions and adapt it for 2100Mhz use.

So I set about the task. I decided on the biquad antenna type, as it’s fairly compact and easy to build, yet provides decent (10-14dB) gain and is quite directional. My primary sources of information were the many WiFi biquad and double bi-quad antenna tutorials and blog entries, such as: Engadget’s; Trevor Marshall’s tutorials. More can be found on my del.icio.us page for the tag ‘antenna’.

This is an interesting hack, and I’d say it’s a hit-or-miss proposition, especially considering that running a cable from a transceiver (in this case, your mobile) to an antenna does produce some signal loss. But if the gain (increased signal) compensates for the loss, then you’ve hit the sweet spot in modifying your system. Still, this is good for stationary cases, and wouldn’t give you much benefit when in a mobile setup, such as in your car. Directional antennae are very sensitive to movement, precisely because they’re directional, and should be pointed straight to the other signal source, in this case at the cell site.

Great use of Google Earth to estimate distance and positioning, though!

July 30th, 2006 Posted by J. Angelo Racoma in Hacks at 6:59 pm Comment Now! »

Are You Up for Modding Your Cellphone?

TheSmart PDA blog posts about a thread on the SPUG forum where a poster writes on his modifying a PalmOne Treo 650.

This project started because I wanted to built an antenna-less treo or a treo with a shorter antenna. I decided to go for the latter because it will be easier for users to upgrade by just getting an antenna and plug it in. Thus I bought an antenna and started looking at how it was constructed. Thanks to treotricks, I was able to have an idea how the antenna was made. I actually did some rough measurements on the dismantled antenna shown on treotricks website (on the monitor itself!!!) before I gotten the spare antenna and decided there may be a possibility of making it shorter. Finally received the spare antenna in my hands, broke it apart and stared at it for a while ……………………. and I realised how I could make it shorter while still using the same internal components!!

A little sandpaper and black paint did the trick. However, I don’t think the Treo looked any better with the shortened antenna. The mod made the antenna look so stubby. I’d say either keep the longer stub or do away with the external aerial entirely. In the first place, the fact that the Treo’s designers decided to keep the antenna external probably means that you should keep it that way.

At any rate, the mod apparently doesn’t touch the actual antenna elements so signal quality should be the same. If you’re interested in getting yourself one without the hassles and headaches of actually doing the mod, you can still order thru the forum. The stubs are for sale for S$50 each (about US$ 31.50).

[via CellPhone9]

July 24th, 2006 Posted by J. Angelo Racoma in Palm, Hacks at 5:25 am Comment Now! »

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