Have a customer who is replacing their old ATT 410 system with a new NEC system. Their current paging system is an ATT Powermate/Talkmate system (P/N's: 22050-001 and 22050-010) and has 4 PagePac horns (P/N: 22050-110). Customer says that on this system all 4 speakers are talkback and they they all operate in one zone. I am looking for recommendations on what to replace the paging unit with. Customer would like to be able to utilize the existing horns, but is not a requirement. But he would like to be able to have a paging system that will allow him to have 4 talkback horns all in one zone. I do not think that the current ATT paging system will work with the new NEC system so I am looking for suggestions on what to try. I talked to both Bogen and Valcom, and the products they recommend only allow 2 talkback speakers per zone. Ideas?

You could probably integrate the paging system to the NEC via CO port like it is probably set up now on the AT&T if not you should be able to accomplish that way. or though the contact closure if my memory serves me correct on that ATT unit

I think there was just a T/R terminals on the feature cartridge,so you should be able to tie in to your system the way you normally do. that's from memory but i think it was just a talk path.

You should be able to reuse the Talkmate but if not the Bogen can handle more horns it's just not recommended because of background noise. Viking also has talk back units.

The Talkmate does connect to some kind of cartridge on the 410. The cable from the Talkmate has 4 leads, and two leads connect to T and R on the cartridge and the other two appear to connect to background music.

I do not know anything about the 410, but the T and R leads on the cartridge do not appear to be a CO line interface. But if you guys think it will work, I will give it a try as I will have a free CO line port available on the NEC.

If you connect to a trunk port, you might need to provide talk battery if the port does not do this.

This should be moved to the NEC forum. I have had alot of trouble interfacing Merlin PagePacs with the NEC platform.

What was your workaround to get it to work? I will be connecting this to a DSX-40 thru a CO line port.

We simply replaced the PagePac equipment with Valcom or Viking as the PagePac equipment always seemed to be "propriatary" to the Merlin platform. However, you could try it on a CO port with a battery feed device from Valcom or Viking. As far as Valocm being limited to 2 talk-back horns per zone just does not seem right to me...

Talked with Valcom and the product they were initally pushing on me was a V-2003AHF, which will only allow 2 talkback horns per zone (so they say). They do have a separate division, still named PagePac (www.pagepac.com), which offers me a solution as to where I can put 4 talkback horns all in one zone.....albeit at a much higher price.