-TM>  Strange, the TDMA/GSM Pacbell PCS phone over here xmits
-TM> 1w.  And it has a
-TM>  longer battery life than the TDMA 200mw digital phone.
The tdma phones xmit during the time slice which would normally be only 1/6 
or 1/3 of a second each second, the cdma phones I beleive are xmitting 
continuously which would account for the cdma phone not lasting as long.
I don't beleive the 1 watt figure on the tdma phone, I've never seen or heard 
any digital phone rated at anything higher than 600mw. What's the model and 
make of that phone you're talking about.
-TM>  The thing I liked the best was for my elite, it had a plug
-TM> where I could
-TM>  plug a mike and earpiece in and walk around in a store and
-TM> be talking to
-TM>  myself but actually be on the phone.  Looked cool, worked
-TM> great.
That is pretty neat, the Oki's have that too, in fact some of them come with 
the earpiece with a microphone mounted a few inches down the cord so you can 
walk and talk with the phone in your pocket, nice idea.
-TM> SC> It would be nice to be able to limit the max power on fm to 200mw as
-TM> SC> well.  Would help the battery life.
-TM> I don't think FM would be able to make any calls then :)
I haven't seen anything in print that says that either tdma or cdma will 
provide a better signal to noise ratio than fm using the same amount of 
power. I beleive that with the same path, power, and antenna, fm will beat 
the digital, especially with weak signals. The digital phone may not be able 
to get enough information thru to reconstruct the voice but the fm signal, 
being narrower and not containing as much information may be quite readable. 
If anyone can quote any source comparing the s/n ratio of fm versus cdma, I'd 
be intererested in reading it.
Handheld phones, analog amps phones, have 7 steps of attenuation, usually 
from .006 watts up to .6 watts. On the oki phones and some others you can 
turn the status monitor on to see how much power the phone is running as well 
as what channel it's on.
200mw to 600 mw is a 3 fold or about a 4.5 or 5 db increase in signal 
strength, not a huge difference.
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