Having your phone being your first ham radio might be a great way to get younger folks into the hobby.
Having your phone being your first ham radio might be a great way to get younger folks into the hobby.
One minor thing - hams would need to be careful they can run LTE/5G "out the box", given most setups use an encrypted layer to the base station. You can turn that down to zero confidentiality (EEA0) but still using integrity checking (EIA>0), but I am not sure if that's a particularly well-supported mode of operation.
North americans also have 902-928MHz 33cm band, but that lacks the paired spectrum above it, so FDD-LTE or GSM are not possible. And I don't think there's a widely supported TDD-LTE spec for it.
Band 30 is a no-go because the downlink is at 2350 to 2360 MHz, which is not a ham band. The ham band is split because of satellite radio. It's 2300 to 2310 and 2390 to 2450 MHz.
And im USA it's that pumctured mess, isn't there also AT&T running Band30 FDD-LTE? Years back when I was searching for LTE phones with Band30 for hamLTE use I only found AT&T carrier locked stuff from USA.
Yeah, it's not ham, but low power levels and RF-shielding-cages should suffice to keep radiated emissions far below interfering levels.
It's also surprisingly well supported, at least on non-US handsets, from when I researched it a bit a few months before the first wave hit and blocked collaborative hardware hacking.