I need to put a very durable phone in a food kitchen for the patrons to use free of charge. My thoughts are we have a handful of elcotel series 5 phones we removed from a customer but i need them to allow free calls. unfortunately the last PC we used to program those died years ago so we have no way to push new rate files into them. My question is, is there a simple way to bypass the need for coin? We were just going to leave the coin return open and do it that way but most of the people are homeless and don't have any coins to push through it.
Thanks
Brian

Sorry, I may have old Elcotel rate files, I'll check tomorrow.

You mean that you want to use the phone as a plain old wall phone? Just rewire so that you have essentially a 500 set. By-pass all the other electronic guts.

I wasn't aware you could do that with the elcotel. From what i remember the keypad will only work with the board.
We are going to try rigging the totalizer to the hook switch so when the handset is lifted it shorts it out.

hitechcomm,
Isn't it possible to change the registers from the keypad to manually enter rates? We have the phone defaulted but it reverts to .25c.

Thanks
Brian