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Vintage Telephony and Telecomms Vintage Telephones, Telephony and Telecomms Equipment |
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25th Feb 2023, 4:55 pm | #1 |
Octode
Join Date: May 2017
Location: St Austell, Cornwall, UK.
Posts: 1,018
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What were these pieces of equipment used for?
Not sure if this is the right place for this question, but since this is
almost certainly Telephone Exchange equipment, I thought I would ask here. Do we have any Telephone Exchange Engineers who are familiar with these Two pieces of equipment. Can't seem to find anything about them. I believe they may have been used in Strowger Exchanges, and are almost certainly Ex BT. Can anybody tell me what they were used for? I assume the first piece of equipment was for testing the signalling somehow judging by the labeling. Ian Ian |
25th Feb 2023, 6:22 pm | #2 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: West Cumbria (CA13), UK
Posts: 6,127
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Re: What were these pieces of equipment used for?
I'm no telephone exchange engineer, but I recognise the first item as a BT Display Unit 11a. One of these turned up for auction recently, so I asked a similar question on the Telephone Heritage Group forum and was informed that it displays dialled digits, either Loop Disconnect (pulse) or DTMF (tone).
Needless to say, I was unsuccessful in acquiring the one for auction.
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26th Feb 2023, 7:25 pm | #3 |
Dekatron
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Greater Manchester, UK.
Posts: 18,713
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Re: What were these pieces of equipment used for?
I've got what you might call the Toys R Us version of the first item.
It was issued to me when we were doing a lot of alternative carrier work and we needed to know exactly what a PABX trunk was prefixing when dialling out.
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27th Feb 2023, 9:37 pm | #4 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Aug 2011
Location: Newcastle, Tyne and Wear, UK.
Posts: 11,556
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Re: What were these pieces of equipment used for?
We have one of those Digitell units at work along with several of its bench top big brothers, the Testel 100E. None of that stuff from Tele-Products was ever at all cheap, despite appearances. The 100Es were about £500-£600 the last time we bought one, just before they were discontinued.
The thing I mainly dislike about both units is that they only have 10(?) character wide displays, not enough to display a 'long' telephone number in a steady state. Instead they scroll the number slowly across the screen. |