sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Reviving an Ernest D3 payphone, Telelink, LCD

This seems like sort of a long shot, but I'm looking for a way to program a Ernest D3 payphone from the mid-90s. I have a local network of a few WE 500s, 554s and a few other unique phones, but this is the first payphone I've tried to get running.

I think I need to locate a software called Telelink that was used with either DOS (possibly called T2) or early windows verions (as Telelink for Windows) and could program these Ernest phones via their internal modems. There is a thread on this forum from about 10 years ago, but it didn't look like I could reply there anymore.

I can see there is also an option to locate and connect an LCD, which looks like a proprietary part, but that appeared to be optional.

Any help or pointers to any version would be appreciated.

Thanks,

There are a few pages/groups on FB that cater to the community of payphone and booth hobbyists. I'm sure there are members there that can assist. Here's one of them:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/705539336219996

As someone who has been down this road recently, I wish you the best of luck. Parts are scarce, software is even rarer, and getting it to run on anything modern is an exercise in frustration.

I don't mean this to dissuade you, in fact I hope it has the opposite effect. Once you start down this path, you find yourself compelled to see it through.

Try the internet archive for software. I managed to find Expressnet for programming protel pay phones there. For software emulation, you might get dosbox to work, but if you don't, try 86box. Rather than emulating a dos environment, it emulates the hardware, and you'll have to find and install dos and any other software you want, just like the bad old days. For me, I could get dosbox to work, but it had a lot of issues. I went to 86box, and after some teething pains, it works really well. For protel phones, you need an external serial modem and some way to dial the phone from the modem. An old electronic key system with analog station ports works for this. I used my avaya partner ACS. I can reliably program protel pay phones now with almost 100% success.

I don't remember if the ernest phones are similar to western electric ones or not. If its a western style phone with the coin slot on the left, ditch the controller and use a protel board. Heck, even if its a right hand coin slot, protel makes boards for those too. They have a button on them to program them locally without a PC.

PM me if you want to get into deeper detail. I've brought back a handful of old payphones, and actually just put one in service at my second job. It doesn't get a lot of usage, but it does generate a lot of conversation. It does work and take coins as it should. For dial tone I'm using an ATA and a voip provider. The service is super cheap so even if it doesn't get much use, I don't care. It's a lot of fun and I enjoy calling it when a customer walks by to see their reaction.

I'd post a picture, but I can never remember how the heck to do it.