On Tue, 11 May 2010, Clifford Heath wrote:

JIMMIE wrote:
I was hoping whether frequency standard or cell phone I was hoping
they all used the same chips. No such luck I guess.

Cell phones have a very high level of integration. In many
phones, there's one RF chip and one for everything else,
and in some, it's all on one chip. Basically there's nothing
except perhaps the display that you can hack.

That contrasts with the early ones, that were a great source of
parts. Even a decade ago, I was still finding the early cellphones,
in big clunky cases, and pretty much all the parts were recognizable
and thus reusable. NE560 compander ICs, 8bit CPUs that could be reused,
IF strips that were often on a small board that could be easily extracted.
TCXOs, crystal filters suitable for use as roofing filters, just lots
of good parts.

I'm not sure where the cutoff point was, but the smaller things got
the less they had parts that were recognizable. Any recent cellphone
has virtually no components, and none are really recognizable and
certainly aren't useful for other purposes.

Even cordless phones seem to have gone that way, a decade ago when
they were still down at the 49MHz range, there were plenty of good
parts, but when they migrated to higher frequencies they got more
integration and fewer useful parts.

Michael VE2BVW