Using a mobile phone with a traditional service plan is not a cheap way to make phone calls, but they are so useful they've become the ubiquitous gadget. And while there's a lot of advertising that promotes the latest mobile phones, you'll have to look much harder to find out what the real cost of ownership will be to use it for a year. My research into this shows that prepaid mobile phone service can save you a lot of money.
A few years ago I had a standard cell phone family plan that I shared with my wife. It was pretty basic with 500 minutes, free calling between our phones, and the standard free weekends, all for only $50 per month (really $64 after taxes and extra fees). After our 2 year contracts expired I started shopping around and concluded that prepaid service was far more cost effective for us.
Here is
the spreadsheet I use to compare the real cost of each of the plans. You can download a copy of the spreadsheet and adjust the numbers for yourself. To use the spreadsheet you need to add up all the minutes you used over a year (even if they were "free" minutes). We needed 2 phones so I only included family plans, and since we aren't heavy text message users I did not consider that in my calculations. If you need lots of text messages or a data plan then you probably won't find a suitable prepaid plan today (sorry iPhone fans). I'm hopeful that a data option will come to prepaid in the future but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Prepaid services can get confusing too, with variable per minute cost and minute expiration periods. The best ones I've found are
Net10, which is always 10 cents with only the expiration time varying (up to 6 months based on how much you spend upfront), and
T-Mobile which is 10 cents and last 1 year when you add $100 increments.
Check them out and run the numbers for yourself. If you have suggestions about how to improve the spreadsheet or tips for lower cost mobile phone services please share them in the comments.
For a while my wife has been asking me to modernize a Model 56E Gilfillan radio from 1947 that belonged to her great grandmother. It's a very attractive wooden box with a vacuum tube AM radio inside. It still worked but we don't listen to much AM radio these days, preferring our MP3 collection on our Squeezebox SLIMP3 player or someone's iPod. We've been using some wireless speakers around the house and been happy with their quality so I finally decided to transplant the innards of the wireless speaker into the radio box.
First I took out the insides of the old radio to see what I was going to be working with. The knobs on the front simply pulled off. Underneath there were only 2 wood screws holding in all the electronics and they were all on a single metal frame that came out with no problems.
I used the guts from a CABLES UNLIMITED SPK-VELO-002 900mHz Wireless Speaker. These are nice speakers with static free sounds and they don't interfere with WiFi networks. It took a while to find and remove all the screws holding it together, but once it was dissected I had the circuit board, buttons, and speaker that I needed for the operation.
I did some soldering to transplant the buttons, and used a generous amount of cardboard and hot glue to achieve my objective. In the end it looks just like the original and we now have an attractive retro way to listen to music in another room. It was a fun project and is a unique conversation piece to show guests.
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