ESN Swap to Motorola Bag/Car Phone.

Hi Everyone,

I've read a few posts in this group about doing online ESN swaps. That got me thinking that I had
two Motorola 2900 Car phones that I purchased new back in 1997. The are 3 watt AMPS only. When I
upgraded to CDMA phones I removed them from the cars and put them on the shelf. I really prefer
talking on CDMA because of the much improved voice security. But, I do spend a lot of time in the
back woods camping, hunting and hiking. I managed to pickup a 14 element 850Mhz Cellular Yagi from a
friend. My thinking was to convert one of these 2900's over to a "bag phone". Motorola sold them as
such. They were the exact same unit as mine, just came in a bag with a battery and a nice little
rubber ducky antenna. If I put one of these into a bag with a 7amp/hr gel cell, and took my Yagi
along, I could hike/4wd up to the top peaks and make calls from really remote places.

So I fired one of my old 2900's up and stuck it on a Mag Mount in my garage. Plenty of signal showed
on the RSSI. These phones had been on Verizon before and were programmed with the same SysID as my
new CDMA phones. So I re-programmed the local number to be the same as my CDMA portable and
proceeded to jump on verizon's website and do a ESN change to see what would happen. The 2900 could
not make any calls (except for 611) prior to the change. As soon as I made the change, I could call
anyone I wanted. Yahoo! My CDMA phone was no longer able to call anything except 611. So far, so
good. When I called my home phone it would show on caller ID as the correct number and sounded
great. So then I called my cell number from my home line. I could hear after one ring, the network
would find the phone. At that moment the RSSI would drop to no bars, and I'd hear the call transfer
to my voice mail right away. A second or so later the signal level would show normal again. If I
turned the 2900 off, then it would ring and ring searching for the phone, and then after several
rings, drop to voice mail. Turn the 2900 on, and one ring, the RSSI would drop to 0 for a couple of
seconds just as it transfered to voice mail. It's as if the 2900 was refusing to take the call from
the network even through the network found it. I tried calling from the 2900 again, that works very
nicely. But no way, no how, would it take an incoming call.

Anyone here have any idea what's wrong. These units were both working fine back in 1999 when they
were removed from service. One was even used for a 911 call when it was off service. I went through
the entire feature options on the 2900 to make sure nothing was screwed up. It has a "no ringer"
option that is turned OFF. It says in the manual that with that option on, and the "no notify"
option on the phone will refuse incoming calls from the network - which is how this thing is acting.
But I triple checked the options and they are not set that way. Any other ideas? Or is there some
reason why Verizon's network would dis-allow an amps only phone on a digital rate plan?? I'm going
to be mostly using this in areas that are roaming (included on my plan) and are AMPS only anyway. So
it's not like I'm ripping them off using my 700 digital minutes on an AMPS only phone since over
there my CDMA phone would drop to AMPS if it could get signal at all.

Any ideas folks?

John Sande