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Started by tallrick, December 18, 2017, 11:35:10 AM

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tallrick

For decades since I was a kid I have collected phones. Starting about 15 years ago I took an interest in pay phones. While I have yet to find an affordable 3 slot phone I have collected several abandoned single slot payphones, Two Western Electrics and several AE style cocot phones. While I have an Elcotel and a Intellical phone most had Protel boards and about half of them were stripped before being abandoned. At the current time I have a Western phone with a Protel board in the front yard, another in my bedroom, A AE style with Protel 7000 in the backyard, another in the shop, and one in the lab, all Protel 7000. There is also a Protel 2000 board in a project phone. At one time I had all of them working but one by one they failed. A problem I found was that the circuit board has a tendency to corrode near the battery connector or the modular port due to the lack of coating and Florida's extreme humidity. The phone then holds the line and the battery goes dead. Cleaning the board and repairing corroded traces seem to fix it. Also the 3.6 Volt lithium battery rusts out and eats the positive terminal in the holder. A piece of steel cut from a junk laser printer and soldered in fixes that. I cleaned and replaced all the batteries in my Protel phones and got them somewhat functional but have a few things to fix as follows:

The phones are on an Asterisk based PBX connected to an Adtran channel bank. They have local 7 digit extensions. At one time I had downloaded a copy of Expressnet and installed it to my old IBM PS/2 running Dos 6.22 but the software was not compatible with my modem. A person who had been in the payphone business gave me a "cheat sheet" of commands to program phones by keypad. While it took several minutes per phone I was able to get every pay phone to behave as I wanted, giving unlimited calls locally for 10 cents and long distance for 10 cents a minute. (each phone has a box of dimes nearby) All would accept incomming calls.

Over the years I lost the cheat sheet and now can only initialize the phones and run with the defaults. The phones will work for a while but then give an error tone after a couple seconds of dial tone. Upon removing batteries the voltages check out fine. Re initializing can bring the phones back but eventually the error returns. Only one of them, the backyard phone continues to work. The default setting is frustrating because any 10 digit call defaults to long distance at 25 cents a minute. That gets to be frustrating. Also I cannot make 3 digit local extension calls or flash the line to put someone on hold as I could before. Curiously the working phone does allow me to put calls on hold but I cannot dial three digit numbers.

What I would like is some helo with Protel commands so I can make another cheat sheet which I am going to put inside the phones this time. Optionally I would like advice on how to set up my own computer on the phone system to manage the pay phones like it was a real cocot system. I know several guys with "converted" payphones and while cool to look at, I think a lot is lost by doing this. Most of the payphone conversion guys remove the circuit board and replace with a regular phone network but in my opinion that is boring.

tallrick

#1
Some of the phones.

kb3pxr

#2
Tha manual for the Protel 7000 boards can be found here and contains keypad programming instructions:

     http://payphone411.com/proteldocuments/310_7000Manual.pdf

Payphone411

I still need to post the full manual for Expressnet. I have just been so buy and have not had the time.

Sigmaz

Quote from: Payphone411 on March 15, 2018, 09:42:08 AM
I still need to post the full manual for Expressnet. I have just been so buy and have not had the time.

Are you referring to the "Holy Grail" thick engineering manual?

That would be really sweet if that thing ever surfaced.


tallrick


Payphone411

Not sure what you mean by Engineering manual. What I have is over  200 pages.
I also have the Elcotel PNM plus manual and PMM Plus training manual plus more I have to post.

I'll see what I can post to the site tomorrow.


Quote from: Sigmaz on April 04, 2018, 04:33:16 PM
Are you referring to the "Holy Grail" thick engineering manual?

That would be really sweet if that thing ever surfaced.

tallrick

I am still fussing with my Expressnet setup. The Hayes 9600 modem serial cable got lost so I have to solder up another. The computr is fixed and Expressnet is running on the local hard drive though

Sigmaz

I heard rumors of an internal document with engineering specs and techical information was somewhere in the public domain.

Quote from: Payphone411 on August 25, 2018, 08:54:43 PM
Not sure what you mean by Engineering manual. What I have is over  200 pages.
I also have the Elcotel PNM plus manual and PMM Plus training manual plus more I have to post.

I'll see what I can post to the site tomorrow.