sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems 1A2 and Comkey Telephones & Systems A very Basic Question, or, Exposing My Ignorance

Greetings to all!

First a little background:

I am the IT Director for a small municipality and I've been in the IT industry for about 20 years. I've had a fascination with phones since I was about 10 when I used to play around with the comkey system at the newspaper office my dad worked for. For the last 6 years or so I have been working with the Asterisk open source VoIP phone system and just completed a 9-month project to transition the city phone system from an old partner II system to an Asterisk VoIP system. In the last two years I have started searching for old phone equipment to play with and hook up to the VoIP system I have at home.

Now to the question:

I've seen the 1A2 phones listed on ebay and I've been temped to get one in working condition. My question is this: When you push a line button on the phone, does it just open the corresponding pair on the line cable or is it dependent on the module(s) in the switch to connect it to the line? In other words: If I wired an old working 1A2 to three station ports (FXS ports) on the back of my VoIP switch, would the phone work as intended and pickup the line that I selected?

I hope I didn't make it too confusing.

There isn't any practical purpose to what I'm doing other than experimenting with the open station ports on my VoIP switch.

Thanks,

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Michael Sheldon

You can access the lines simply by putting the tip and ring of each FXS port on the tip and ring of the line buttons. Assuming this has the current to ring the bells you'd have to add two bells or buzzers to the tip and ring of the other two lines as the bell in the phone won't ring on all three lines without a KSU and related equipment. You also wouldn't have hold or lamps, so why bother. Get yourself a shoebox and do it right.

Do a search for 'shoebox' in this category, it's a small 1A2 KSU that is 50% (?) larger than a shoebox and about the same shape. There are actually at least 2 systems that fit in the category, ITT601 and WE551. There are also several posts that will direct you to 'practices' (manuals) for them, as well as for the many permutations of 1A2 telephones. Have fun, 1A2 is a ball to use and can do many things that are hard-to-impossible to do with 'modern' eletronic phone systems, VOIP or otherwise!

And to the forum! John C.

C*NET, the Collectors\' Network

Click on the above to see what the rest of us old telephone collectors are doing with Asterisk and legacy equipment.

Arthur,

This is great. After clicking on the link and brwsing around for a bit, I signed up for the list, registerd, and reserved an office code. I don't have any legacy equipment currently, although I may end up with the retired partner system from work pretty soon.

Can't wait to get my switch hooked up to the network.

Thanks for the link.

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Michael Sheldon

Michael, welcome to both the Sundance Forum and to C*NET, "The trailing edge of telecommunications" (That was my little contribution to the website)

You don't need a big old clunker, like my 701 PBX -- just a 1A2 sytem will be acceptable, or indeed any old key system.

I can be reached on C*NET 749-0100 or PSTN 631-749-0100 for a chat anytime.

What office code did you reserve?

Arthur,

I reserved 343 which was as close as I could get to the 303 area code that was originally assigned to Colorado.

It amazes me that C*NET has basically created a private global telecommunications network. I'm not going to have time to sit down and read the docs to hook my switch into the system until Sunday, but I'll try and give you a ring as soon as I connect.

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Michael Sheldon