We’re not great cellphone users. We use ours for echo-location in huge stores, at the state fair, or when otherwise lost from each other. We occasionally use it for a call when traveling.
For this, we’ve been billed 80.00 a month for the pair of us.
Lynn Abbey put us onto an unadvertised feature of AT&T, namely the Go-phone. When you go to the AT&T site, you won’t see them mentioned. You’ll have to search. If you accept ‘chat’ the agent can find it, and can find the plans associated with them, including simply buying phone cards at your grocery. Here’s ours: 1. two phones @ 9.95 each, plus shipping. That’s 21.95 for the pair of us. 2. access at 10 cents a minute, paid by a credit card on file. If we call each other, yep, it’s 20c, but hey, “Where are you?” and “Right by the broccoli”, or “Would you pick up some milk while you’re out?” doesn’t take more than 20c and saves a lot of hiking and frustration. 3. access to AT&T coverage, which is broad, and good.
No more 80.00 a month phone bill. More like 10.00 a month, given our normal usage. If you have your phone only for emergencies, consider how much you could save.
Always glad to help… I’ve been on Go-Phone since it was Cingular back in the late 90s. I had it when I visited you in Oklahoma! I thought you were completely satisfied with your cell service.
Lol, Lynn, and then we forgot—life has been that interesting, with winter coming on and trying to get 2 e-books up! But I remembered today. Thank you so much for telling us! We are always glad to save money—and since you were directly participant in the Great Cellphone Screwup that involved the South Dakota and Nebraska Highway Patrol, every motel in Wall, South Dakota, my parents in Dallas, you, in Florida, a motel operator in Valentine, Nebraska, and pizza—:lol: you know that we are glad to have advice on cellphones!
It’s really not that hard to find. gophone.com will take you to the appropriate area at ATT. I’ve used it since it was Cingular, too. I have my phone mostly to be on call to help my brother should he have a health emergency. It’s cheap and reliable.
I used them for a long long time. Only two things to remember:
1. The account I had stipulated an amount of time in which to use up your minutes/money. The bigger the amount of $$$ you load, the longer you have to use it—and sometimes, adding more $$$ to your account before they expire lets you ‘roll over’ the balance.
2. There is a certain amount of grace time you have between letting your money/minutes expire and before they deactivate your account. This is actually very important, because if you let your account expire through no activity your number is deactivated and you have to go to an AT&T store for a new sim card. 30.00 for that. I did it twice.
However, for me it was the best option because I rarely use a cell phone. Much cheaper than a plan and especially so if you don’t use the smart phone data packages.
I ended up with an iphone via my husband getting a new one. Not really for me. I like it, it’s fun–but I so rarely use it. It has to be on the charger all the time whether or not you turn it on–so often after just a day of being in my purse–it’s completely dead. Of course I forget this and am always dismayed at finding it inoperable when I actually need it!
Good luck with go phones, girls!
Here’s a way to communicate for one easy payment of $45, unlimited minutes, only drawback you have to be within 22 miles of each other.(More like 16, but hey it’s cheaper than a cellphone by far.)
http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product2_200422250_200422250
Xesophon: Good idea, but do it one better. Get a ham license and use 2 meter handpacks. Easy 30 mile range (with repeater.) Those GMRS radios are truly limited to about 3 miles, less with terrain/buildings. (That frequency is limited to line of sight, more so than the 2meter, which is still limited.)
The pay as you go phones are great for limited use. Another option is to go text only. I have seen unlimited text for $20/month.
I’ve been using Tracfone for years. The last phone I bought (After six years it was time to update.) cost about twenty dollars with double minutes for as long as I own the phone. This means I renew once a year for about one hundred dollars and 450 minutes which doubles to 900. Because I renew on line I generally get an offer to add a year for another $25.00 and add another 900 minutes. The nice thing is that the minutes carry over from year to year. I use cheapo long distance cards with local access number that cost about 1.5 cents per minute. I have so many minutes now that I often use it for long distance. If you don’t need to make a lot of calls pay by the minute is the way to go. 😉
Or Family Radio System:
http://www.radioshack.com/family/index.jsp?categoryId=2032071
But thanks for the gophone info; I’ll definitely be checking that out!
I should also second the ham radio plugs. If you get the equipment, you will always be connected, come disaster, come flood (assuming waterproofing), come nuclear war (assuming you keep your equipment in a EMP-proof enclosure). 😉 Ham radio is the last ditch communications system in disaster. FRS…isn’t.
Ham radio is one of those things I’ve been thinking about for decades but haven’t done. It used to be hard and technical, but since only a few die-hards use CW (Morse code) and all electronics replace faults at the board level (if not by replacing the entire device), the requirements for being a Technician ham operator are essentially being able to memorize a few technical things. For that qualification, you get communication that cannot be used for commercial purposes, but is free and will work in areas outside of cell coverage. Way outside of cell coverage, like mid-state Nevada.
Never wanted to get a HAM radio license myself, but I do have an old DX-160 hooked up to a decent antenna. It was able to open up another,for the most part forgotten,world of short wave to me.
I occasionally listen to news broadcasts from around the world and was able to listen on what was actually happening on the ground when Katrina hit Louisiana.
I rarely use the phone unless I have to and thought some cheap, but sturdy, hand-helds would be perfect for stores, traveling, and conventions vs paying $80 a month for something that you rarely use. The call alert feature makes all the difference.
The professional models and a radio license kinda seem like overkill, unless you want to be a walking radio station.
Back when I was a teen, I bought a killer radio, huge array of bands with a 6′ antenna, and it took a full dozen D-cell batteries to power. Still does—my dad used it to listen to football games, and I’m pretty sure my brother has it. That thing could pick up Europe, ships at sea (in Oklahoma), you name it. Varied by the weather, of course, and it weighed a ton, about a foot and change long and over half a foot thick, at least 2″ of it batteries. If you just want to hear and not to speak, I’m pretty sure they still do that kind of radio.
They do. You can buy some pretty fancy receivers from Icom that will run you into 4 figures, easily. In fact, the R-1, which is no longer in production was so good, it retailed for about $4000.00. They have newer receivers, and there are a whole lot of people who just listen. Sometimes they’ll send cards to the stations they’ve heard, requesting location, type of transmitter, antenna, power, operator’s name, etc. The idea is to send them back to the listener with that information, and they can put the card on their wall for a “trophy”. When I was in the Navy, we got a few of them sent to my ship, and since I was a Radioman, communications was my area, we’d fill out the card and mail it back. It’s conceivable with the right atmospheric conditions, the right frequency, the right type of signal (Single Sideband vs AM vs FM vs CW vs data) that you could very easily hear ships at sea while you were listening in Oklahoma. Our HF radios were designed to transmit at 1500 watts of power, and we could communicate by radioteletype over thousands of miles given the right conditions. Now that I’m a ham operator, I sometimes listen just for the fun of listening, but without an external antenna, I can’t transmit from my house. I need to go mobile for that, and right now, I’m not allowed to drive 🙁
Joe,
Sorry to hear you’re not driving. I’m guessing you haven’t been out to the range lately. Forgot to include a shooting tip for you. If you are getting glare off of iron sites use a sharpie marker to blacken them, then use a little alcohol to clean it off when you get home.
For retro joy, you can’t beat the old “boat anchor” receivers. This is my baby.
http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Yaesu_FRG-7
“Pay-as-you-go” plans like the one you describe are actually available for several US carriers, including Verizon and T-Mobile (as well as AT&T). I use one because I’m only in the US for about one or two months during the year… Since I have an unlocked GSM phone (from Germany), I can actually just switch SIM cards when I come to the US, which saves me having to carry an extra phone around.
Of course, they’re not as lucrative for the carriers as monthly plans, which is why they don’t always advertise them prominently.
I’ve got ours through Consumer Cellular, which gives a nice discount for AAA membership, and will go out of their way to help you set up a phone you already have from somewhere else on their network. No contract, lower monthly fees than other carriers we’ve found, and decent coverage. The big plus for us is that international rates are so low–I think 10 cents a minute but haven’t got a bill handy to check. We have a more expensive plan, but we don’t have a house phone. We’ve had good coverage with them when we’ve been up in Spokane, too, but we tend to stick near the main highways, the airport, and the Riverside Park area.
I had a bad experience with ATT pay as you go service. I’m not using my phone often enough so, each month my balance was going up and I had to keep adding money not to lose what I had already paid. I did pay more to have a longer expiration date but simply ended up with a higher balance. Finally, I forgot to renew and lost over $100. Since, I’ve joined my husband on a family plan: he can use all the minutes I’m not using and I have a phone in case of emergency!
In the early years of GoPhone I did have a similar problem with minutes expiring because I waited until the last minute to add to my account (I saw no reason to “flip the switch” to start a new ninety-day countdown when the previous one still had a few days to run.) These days, though, I’ve got the account tied to my credit card and they reliably removed a pre-set amount every ninety days.
In my GoPhone flavor, there’s a $500 max for the rollover account, but so far that hasn’t been a problem.
@Xenophon, I’ve actually seen that done, as well as the USAMU using a smudge lighter or whatever they call it, to put carbon black on the sight. When I shoot, I try to concentrate on the front sight, put it at 6:00 on the black of the target, and very carefully squeeze the trigger. Right now, I’m not taking any chances, so I don’t take the rifles to the range until my vision clears up. I still go to the range, but it’s for clerical and administrative stuff as I’m the secretary.
Thanks for the tip!