Hi welcome to tear down! Tuesday We've got a Globalstar satellite phone for you. This came in the previous mailbag Oh courtesy of Dan from My Electronic Responsible Recyclers and I'll link them in down below. Thank you very much Dan and all the guys there and this is a 2005 vintage satellite phone. but I just had a quick squeeze and apparently um, at least one Australian company is still selling this thing 10 years later for like 500 bucks.

Although this is the GSP 1600 model, but I it's been replaced by the GSP 1700 model which is the latest one. And yes, it's um, basically it's a tri mode phone. Let me take a look here. as you can see, it's got a regular old old-school cellular antenna for the regular.

I believe the regular our cellular bands and then it's got what I'll call any reptile antenna because well it ear X like that and and goes up and bingo you've got your satellite antenna and now it's looking. Here we go. It does actually work. It's looking for service.

Now that we instantly put that antenna up, you can see that this is from Qualcomm. You've no doubt heard of them. It was a partnership between Qualcomm and some other company, this Global Star Network. It's one of us.

several satellite services and this one start. They put their first satellites up in 1998 and they started. Look at that. look at those graphics that LCD is really quite dodgy.

but safety your most important call. Anyway, yeah, first satellites up in 1998 and the first service in around about 2000 I think and they've got a network or did have a network of 48 operational satellites plus four spare and there are peanut low Earth orbit orbiting around about are 1400 kilometres or there abouts and it covers most of the continents in the world. It doesn't cover the polar regions, but yeah, it certainly covers all of Australia and probably I Don't know. maybe looking at the coverage map here, it is maybe about you know, 90% 95% of most landmass.

so that's not too bad at all. And their original price for this thing was a dollar 79 a minute? I'm not sure how they can make money with that there. I Think they've got like 250, couple hundred thousand users or something like that. And basically given the growth of modern mobile phones, practically everyone on the planet has mobile phone coverage.

especially in them. You know most urban areas, then you know the needful only satellite phones is our very nation. Really, almost always has been kind of niche when you're out. you know most of the time you're going to be in cellular coverage network, but it's quite common for you know, people who go out hiking and stuff like that to take one of these up.

Satellite phones, go on, go into remote locations and stuff like that I Know that even in Australia here's some government departments actually if you're going, you know and right in the Outback and stuff like that was no cellular coverage I Think it's mandatory that you actually you know OHSS regulations and all that crap that you take one of these satellite phones. be it one of these Global Star Network ones or one of the other brand ones. and I Love this erectile antenna. You'll notice that it's a sort of you know tucked in down there.

When you pull it up like that, it goes erect and extends woohoo and it locks into position like that. That is actually for if you're left-handed If you hold it up to your left hand ear, it's designed for the antenna to point directly upwards like that with the mobile phone in that natural orientation like that. or and it snaps locks into that location or you bend it over, lock it into that one. See, there you go.

It really is a quite natural actually somebody was. somebody was thinking. with that, they put the antenna up right. I've got to get the best you know signal-to-noise ratio you can I guess and for left-handed or right-handed use, so it's directly up like that beauty.

Check it out. I've come outside and we've got one. Awesome. Uh, it was.

it had something there. It had something. So I wouldn't have expected our coverage inside the lab. Satellite coverage in there because we're you know, inside a big modern office building surrounded by our concrete smack in the middle.

There we go. Yeah, this, there's there's I think that's two bars I think we're sweet. There we go. I Cannot let's try dial-a-joke So yeah, it at least connected.

outsider. Didn't expect anything indoors of course. but yeah, Dan did mention there's something off the cellular antenna I'm not sure if he's talking about that or whether or not he was talking about the that. Well yeah, I guess he would have said satellite antenna if he meant that.

Anyway, it seemed to work. The reception was dodgy though. it seemed to it like barely hold at all. And there's our battery pack.

what is at 7.2 Volt Lithium Ion Yep, and I don't know if these things have SIM cards actually I've got no idea, but it doesn't. It doesn't look like it. and but anyway, assembled in the USA USA USA So let's rip this sucker apart and don't see. Oh by the way, this is an look at this evil piece-of-shit connector.

look at this custom job. oh that is just really is evil. I Mean you know you're stuck in the middle of bloody nowhere, right? And you know, especially in today's age. with it, you know the microUSB are standard, even a mini USB Heck to up, you know, charge things up with your power adapters and stuff like that.

Unbelievable. Sure. Okay, you've got your um, your car charger thing with it, but geez, like no-fail some poor bastards obituary reads that died in the middle of the Bloody Outback because of a stupid connector. Alright, so let's crack this thing open.

There was a coupler box screws on the end here and I expect a couple of yeah, well, kind of see it already. a couple of our shielded cans because this is going to be what tri Mode As they said. like you know, they're going to have separate transceivers for the satellite phone. It's going to draw a fair bit of power, hence why they can only turn it on when you flip the antenna up.

and of course the regular solar one like this. And it's actually not surprising that this had the like effect. Maybe like at it almost a 10 year life span on this phone. because well, yeah, they haven't got that consumer demand to keep redesigning these things every bloody nine months.

and and you know, or eighteen months, however long? I Think that's the average time people change their phones. Isn't it eighteen months or or a year or something like that? I don't know. Anyway, yeah, they just don't have that sort of our commercial pressure because of the low volume. so they make one design and they stick to it.

Might have to get my spudger out. I Think there's a nice little touch. Check it out. There's a oh, rubber bumper in there that just sits in there like that to to stop it working against that in stop, it's not.

That's very nice. Nice little attention to detail there. I Love it From no doubt the same person who designed the erectile antenna. imagine having that on your resume.

I Did I've got a patent for the erectile antenna? Yeah. I wonder can anyone find the pattern on that? Maybe it is I don't know. Dole I found the Sim module. It actually popped out I couldn't actually get that out before.

but yeah, it popped out. It does have Sim in it. look at that so that's a no doubt. the account is probably dead, but somebody hasn't paid their bill.

Oh look how big my antenna is. It looks like there's a little thing under there that maybe flip this cap off. That may be some big-ass screw under there holding it, holding bolt, holding it in. And that's why I can't get the top part of this damn case off.

There's got to be some clever way. this words that spins are round like this. but if I can get it off anyway, looks like there's two collectors in there, which is rather interesting. I'm not sure what the goal is there, but I mean you think I can get this bloody thing off? No, it's probably something easy, idiot-proof way to do it.

Not just I'm the master idiot. And yes, of course it was obvious that this cover came off here. this sticker. but it, trust me, that was like a real tough polycarbonate.

There seemed to be absolutely no way to get it out. but yeah I persisted. You couldn't cut through it. It was a big poly car by sheet, well and truly stained.

It doesn't look like there's any glue residue, but yeah, it did not look like that come out at first go. But anyway, today was obvious I Thought there might have been some clever system that this sort of you know rotated around a certain position and then lift it out. Kind of like the the bails on like a you know, yeah, like you know, tech an Agilent. Here you rotate into a certain position and then they then they just you know pop out magically.

But tada, there you go. There's our you can see I've had a bit of a hack around there. It's a bit of strain relief in there, so that's alright. And there's a indent that oh yeah, there we go.

There's the in debt. There's the indent and they've got another indent around here somewhere as well. Right there we go. The second one pops into there nice and the antenna connectors aren't budge soldered onto the board.

A that no siree. Bob They're a nice little like Ho export interconnection. You notice that there's three connectors down in there, so that's rather interesting. It was this and the antennas were plugged into this one and this one, but this one over here which looks different, so that's probably some sort of production test connector perhaps or some other model that has a different, type of antenna I Don't know, but yeah, more likely to be maybe a production test connector.

A little bit more detail on that in there. Yeah, look, they got nice and all. Nice little spring there. they don't have it on the other on this top side up here, but down there that's really quite nice.

like that, they've designed that well. Anyway, Tada, there's no extra two screws. Now we're gonna be in like Flynn Here we go, we're about to lift the skirt and look, hey, there we go, we're off. And yeah, that's exactly what was seen in Um, by the way, I've torn down an old Motorola brick phone.

It was from the 90s I think I can't remember the exact date anyway. I'll link that in there. very similar construction of this or your separate RF cans for everything. All your chipsets weren't very integrated back then and especially because they're it's not a consumer band or anything like that I don't believe so they probably had to, you know, roll their own custom solution so you wouldn't expect like you know, a single chip solution like you get these days for the RF front end.

So that's no surprise whatsoever. So that looks like a whole RF board in its own right. There's nothing else there. Aha.

Once you give it a moment's thought, it's pretty obvious why. They're right. Using two antennas on this thing, one's going to be transmitted, one's going to be receive. It's just going to be a much more efficient system for a satellite base don't reception.

whereas the mobile phone antenna here is the here's the connector for the mobile phone antenna. There it is. It just makes a just makes contact with the Dickey thing over there and when you extend that out, that just yeah, makes contact with that. It's a really old-school Nokia kind of wire.

you're doing things. and this one, um, you might be. Well, it probably is a production test connector as we said, but that's obviously the mobile. that's look that's near the mobile that's in the path of the mobile phone output there.

So yeah, maybe for an external antenna, Maybe for production test or both. And sure enough, if you check the global star specs, yes, this thing operates in the UM l-band ie. between one and two gigahertz transmit is between 16 10 and 16 20 megahertz, and receiving is between 484 megahertz and 2499 megahertz. So that's yes, you know, on the lowest side of the Elbe and 15 to 30 yard centimeter range for those who like to.

For those ham buffs who won't like to work in centimeters, and their reason they're using the L band for satellite phones like this is the same reason GPS is in the old band as well because it had and lots of other Us services that communicate with satellites because it's the most efficient in terms of you know it's not obstructed by you know, the storms and clouds and and tree cover and all that sort of stuff you know it basically gets through so that's why you know there's a specific reason. Also, anything below one gig and above like roughly ten giggle there abouts is really not suitable. Eva So it's not just a matter of higher frequency, you can actually go to high above 10 gig. Then you get massive ionosphere delays so ever above or below those frequencies.

So yeah, our band is pretty much a sweet spot and Elide viewers would have spotted this distributed element filter. It's a very simple one. You'll notice that trace above there and that trace there aren't connected to anything. they're left floating and that's very deliberate.

They're actually using that as a little bit of filtering just there. So I've done previous videos on distributed element filters and having seen previous vintage GSM Phone tear downs. You will instantly notice this block here, which if you haven't seen one before, looks very funny, but it's actually a dielectric filter. So it's a huge block of dielectric material with various.

You'll notice different size holes in it, so it's various tuned holes in there so it's actually working as a filter block. And they're They're really unusual beasts, but there are. They're very common in GSM mobile phones, and that's directly on the output stage. So we follow the RF output from presumably the main RF amplifier out here.

Then we got it. going through this canned I Have no idea what that puppy is doing, but he won't. Is that some sort of common output coupled transformer? No, I'm not sure. Anyway, we've got that can there.

We've got to then going out into our dielectric filter here. Then it pops out there, see the trace come along here, and then it's picked off. The trace is AC coupled off here. So that's got to be some sort of RF detection or something.

Oh, actually is that it is that inductor. If that's an inductor, then that could be some DC in power insertion into the output stage. perhaps to power stuff. So it's that.

it's either that or it's RF detection. Anyway, it goes around here, snakes around a little bit of it, the distributed oh my filter. As we saw they're not sure that puppy is doing, maybe some sort of clamp and then we've got that output Jack which is not being used, could be a test connector and then we've got some. just some output Morse some output filter components here missing inductor there down the ground and Bob's your uncle? Go straight out to the antenna Ethyl RF is that the codename for this project? Ethyl who has named after one of the designers grandmothers or something? Hmm.

And of course you'll notice that I'm not sure whether or not this is the transmit or receive ones for the satellite phone, but obviously a completely separate blocky. and oh no, we can't lift that. Oh wow. Thankfully we can get the cans off all these other ones.

Annoyingly, they've got these things I Might cut those off in a minute to get a look at the chip numbers, but those who know there are GSM mobile phone block diagrams might be able to point out with these ones up. So in here there's going to be typical blocks you'll find in some, like a old-school Gsm. iPhone You know they do this pretty integrated these days, but back then yes. separate sections, all separate can base.

So you're gonna have you know, bandpass filtering on? yeah, but you're gonna have some low noise amplification somewhere. you're gonna have a couple of voltage controlled, so laters somewhere perhaps you're gonna have a humane TC EXO is probably there. You're gonna have more and more filtering somewhere. Then you're gonna have a power amplifier block.

So I don't know. let me shop blows out and we should be Audiio. do some part number. huh? Look at this.

this RF amp here. they've actually sharing the same can. This one's clearly driving. See the trace going out there to the satellite phone output I guess output field or maybe output power amp or whatever.

So there that that's a rock wall chipset? Can't find any data on that first glance. Interestingly, 17th Week 99. This is supposed to be a 2005 vintage phone, but it's using rock wall chips dated from 1999, so geez. I don't know what's going on there.

It couldn't find any data for that puppy. that's for the GSM output and well, it probably got looks like we've got a some switch mode action happening around here. You can tell by the bigger big-ass inductor, that big-ass caps in there and the large current traces and multiple pins tied together. you don't even have to look at those pin numbers.

But by the way, not everything is going to be on here because there is a ton of stuff on the bottom side. I Think we got even more shielded cans on the bottom side of this board. Actually, this is really interesting. Take a look at this custom power connector we saw on the end before.

It's actually got connectors on both sides of this puppy and they've actually wedged the board's together like that so you can see the pads under there and we've got power going to both boards and the little clips in there. Those tiny little clips actually clip in through those holes there, so really is quite a neat solution. Anyway, look at this bottom side. We just got a ton of cans.

This big border board interconnect there and that is just a man. a ton of stuff. that is the bottom side, so they've shielded all that, so that's going to be all the processing and whatnot. But on this side here.

here's the bottom side of the RF section and the cans. Wow cows until the cans until the cows come home. Got some really good dumb RF shield in between the two modules like that, so that's that's really good. They're getting the RF impedance down using those Very nice is made in Taiwan Rubbish.

I Thought this was made by Uncle Sam in the United States of America Wow Look at this folks. Can't get all the cans off unfortunately. but jeez. I've got a ton of stuff under here.

Wow We could be here all day if you tried to find part numbers on these old puppies. don't know exactly what that down in there is, but I would my guess would be some sort of saw filter perhaps. And no surprises for eventually finding a qualcomm part in here. that's a TCM 8,400 a Once again, can't get any data on that, but you can see it on these.

Those are you know, third-party chip vendor sites and they're obsolete part vendor sites and things like that. Yeah, I don't know. Some sort of baseband processor or something. Perhaps got ourselves a nineteen point six eight mega SS brand crystal once again sort of late 1999.

So this thing was definitely manufacturing 99s. Not like using old chips back then. So yes, is a really old handset. Not sure with that puppy with TMX Lw3 is made in France Whoa! Hi to my French viewers I Love the SOT 23 mounted on a ceramic hybrid base.

Look at that. That is unusual. There could be some yeah, other hybrid II stuff on the other side? perhaps? Yeah, who knows. Yeah, we can just generally scan around the other modules here and scream out if you see anything remotely familiar, go on.

yell it out. Leave it in the YouTube comments. You can do it. Yes, Oricon.

that could be a local oscillator of sorts in there. Perhaps. Is it a double nine to seven? Let's look that one up. Yeah, don't know why I bother anymore.

A zippity-doo-dah err on that path I'm not taking more than two seconds to I have a look at these things. So I don't know what's going on in. there is not much. Maybe some sort of mixing perhaps? Who knows that? Not sure it's under.

so they got a can within a can there by the looks of it. and there's that main. I presume. TCX Oh, but yeah, it's quite a lot of blocks under here.

Unbelievable. I Could be here all day trying to sort this out and unfortunately, can't get those cans off. Would have to brutalize them. I'll give you one guess what main processor is inside this thing.

Go on. guess you're ready tomorrow. Intel I 386 x guessed it. Come on, be honest I didn't and we've got more.

Qualcomm Goodness. The gum Mm I'm CD ninety once again, can't get any data on that one. At first glance got some maximum and Ti action happening down here under here that until 386 wasn't and I said they had to put an analog devices DSP in there as well Wow and under this metal can over here we've got some mouth flash and memory as well and that's all she wrote on those boards. But check out all those test points and curiosity got the better of me inside this.

I can. instead of desoldering just easier, just open the thing up with a pair of us side cutters and pliers and it looks like we have maybe an attenuator and filter. perhaps? That's yeah, that's about all she wrote. So there you have it that is inside a 15 year old satellite phone.

And as you can see yet technology has progressed a lot in terms of well, you know we don't. satellite phones in your pockets of a coating. It can now get Iridium and other networks, maybe even Global Start I Don't know but attachments for your mobile phone so they slip over your smartphone and they can ya go? You can go satellite so you don't actually need a satellite phone anymore. You just get the add the clip module that you go on the back of the thing and it just does the business.

So yeah, but hey, these were run extremely popular. This might even be one of the most popular satellite phones of all time, perhaps. So they I think they probably sold a couple hundred thousand of these puppies. Well yeah, the March of Progress.

You just don't get those huge individual canned constructions like this anymore. Well, you kind of do. But yeah, look at just just how many of them there are. You'd get much more integration these days.

I Mean this is an absolutely ginormous phone. Pretty standard surface mount technology. well, all like quad flat-pack seen here. nothing special as basically no BGA devices I Don't think there's none of that fancy rubbish.

No siree. Bob There, there's all just you know, pretty much, um, just standard off-the-shelf through-hole stuff that they could have. You know, you could manufacture this in any art local assembly house down the road? You don't see it. Need some whiz-bang you know? Fox State-of-the-art Foxconn Factory to manufacture your ridiculously state-of-the-art our iPhones and other smartphones these days which built down to the absolute tiniest dimensions possible with the highest amount of integration.

But hey, that's wasn't a factor. Fifteen years ago, this would have been designed, maybe started the design of this, say seventeen years ago. Back in, you know, 96 97 when they were putting up the first network, they would have started designing their first phone. So yeah, that's what they had to work with and it cost wasn't a huge factor.

I Don't think because this is not your regular our consumer grade phone, but we saw a very similar construction in the Motorola brick phones which ever torn down before and if you want to see it, wait the end of the video and I'll put up rolling links to those videos and there you go that's inside your antenna. We've got helical wrapping there around your like some sort of you know mylar or something form or I don't know what that is. But anyway, so that's look and there's that's interesting how they're bridged them at that point there and then got them going off in that direction and that direction. So they're going to come in from here that overlap into there.

So anyone into their antenna design Theory are please kiss in on that one. So anyway, you're going to have a transmit and receive antenna in there and not sure what's going on there. We've got a package under there. Well, I've got some sort of some sort of package by the looks of it that could be some thermal but probably not a thermal peg because they haven't put that on the bottom.

but I think there's something something going on there. Bingo. we're gonna sauce another dielectric filter there. Check that out and and it's a package that's a bit unusual, right? Good eye, right? how you doing mate.

Yeah, so I think what's going on here is that this one down here if they shorter stubs like that is our receiving antenna because that's I believe. got to be a higher frequency and this one up here is our transmitter. so you can just tell it's longer longer wavelength because there are. As I said, the transmitter frequency is lower than the received frequency.

so I think that's what's going on there, but they've wound them on the same former and if you look carefully in there, it looks like they got a pattern on the inside as well like an inside for that one. A actually extends out longer than this side, so that's quite unusual. Anyway, hope you enjoyed that. If you want to discuss it, jump on over to the Eevblog forum.

The link is down below: I Hope you liked it. Catch you next time you you you.