Design of a GSM phone booth for low cost rural communication

The GSM phone booth was designed as a mobile phone with solar arrays on the roof. These arrays are for charging the phone batteries and powering the booth during the day while the batteries which can be bigger, powers the phone at night or in the absence of sunlight. The cell phone platform was integrated into the booth such that when a SIM card is inserted it can be used as if it were a personal phone. The SIM card holder was designed in such a way that the user carries it along to the phone booth and slots it into the provided slot on the booth before making a call. It was also designed to switch on or off the phone booth such that when the card is removed the booth is switched off while the battery continues to charge. This is another mean by which the battery life is extended. The design provides a low cost approach for extending mobile communication to rural areas and also for campuses and public area

Rural Mobile Telephony: A VSAT (Satellite) based Approach

This work presents a VSAT based approach for extending mobile communication access to rural communities in developing countries using VSAT and satellite technology. The rural areas are clustered into village community cells with each cluster being served by a non regenerative bidirectional repeater system. The telecommunication technology of choice is the GSM standard. Traffic from the rural areas is collated together at the access point which serves as an interface between the village community cells and the satellite. The access points perform a frequency translation moving the signal from the GSM band to the satellite band at the transmitter and vice versa at the receiver. The system maximizes the advantage of satellite communication technology over other types in linking remote areas to urban centers that are geographically far apart. The satellite then links the village cell to the operator’s network via a dedicated BTS in the urban area. The system has the advantage of being modular, scalable and solar powered due to the low traffic from rural areas

Analysis and Development of a Low Cost GSM Telephone System for a Rural Area

This work presents the analysis and development of a low cost GSM telephone system. A review of radio receiver and·transmitter architectures showed the superheterodyne as having a better performance over the direct conversion radio in terms of selectivity and complexitY.. A low power bidirectional transceiver was developed based on the superheterodyne architecture. The specifications of the bidirectional transceiver were computed using specifications of the component modules in the spreadsheet approach. The resulting design was optimized using Matlab programs and simulated using the Genesys simulation software. The results show the front end of the transceiver as the most critical part of the transceiver. Both the generic and proposed transceivers had frequency response from 1700MHz to 1900MHz, the same dynamic range and noise figure but the proposed transceiver achieved these results with a 50% reduction in power amplifier and low noise amplifier chi!JS and the 75% reduction in the number of voltage oscillator chips. This reduction in component count fed to a 40.59% reduction in power requirement and a reduction in the overall cost of the proposed transceiver. The reduced power consumption of the architecture enables the use of solar energy as an alternative source of power supply for the transceivers