Any advice on buying a hobby phone?  Like what carrier, where to buy, procedures to activate, etc.?  Or if there's a certain thread already on the subject maybe point me to it.  I tried the search feature but searching for "hobby phone" or something similar yields about a thousand hits.  Thanks.

Buy a t-mobile pay by the minute Phone at Walmart with cash.$14.99 plus tax.Also buy $10.00 worth of minutes t-mobile card to activate your minutes.Done deal no record of anything.Your a ghost.Good Luck!!

I will offer my 2 cents.  Depends on how much you hobby and your needs.....
They have a phone you can get at Wal-Mart, straight talk is the carrier... It is 45 a month for unlimited talk, text and web...  Cheap!! If you only hobby every once in a while they have a 30$ plan that is 1000min's and not sure on the text and web.. I know a few fella's down my way that has switched to them.  You can also put it in your hobby name... So if you want to be John Doe, you can.....
Just my thoughts......

You can buy the minutes at any Holiday or SA.  It seems to work in areas where T-mobile or AT&T doesn't have good coverage as well.

Use Vumber.

For a low monthly fee, you get a real phone number. When someone calls that number, its forwarded to your cell. You get the Caller ID info.

When you make a call from your cell phone, you can use Vumber service again and the receiver sees your vumber assigned number instead of your cell phone.

So you get complete anonymity/safety/privacy and still get to use your cell phone.

Cheers,

It's still in beta, and not publicly available just yet, but you can either sign up for an invite code, or find someone who has one to spare.

I have 3 invite left.

I'll second Net10, it seems to work fine.  If you examine the online registration process closely, you will see you do not need to enter personal information.  And, you can use the registration site through an anonymizer (not all sites work well through them, thank you javascript).  Depending on how you value your privacy, this could be an issue.

I also suggest buying an extra card to keep in the glove compartment etc. because the minutes will run out after x number of days (30?).  It'll be nice to have once you get the hankering, but have run out of days.

Rounding out the "they're out to get me" psychosis, leave the phone in a reasonably safe spot, always leave it off unless you're expecting a call, and never use it for non-hobby reasons.  That phone represents a physical barrier between normal-you and hobby-you.  Until legislators decide to let adults act like adults, mind you.

Who knew...this was pre-installed on my Nexus One...no invite code needed!  I suppose it makes sense since I bought the thing from from Google directly.