atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems 1A2 and Comkey Telephones & Systems curious about 1A2

GOOD OLD DAYS?????


Hell folks I still have a dozen of the babies in service now!!

Heck of alot easier to troubleshoot than the digital stuff or the hybrids!!

No program snaffues...........either the circuit is there.....or isn't!

Scary part is YES I can wire 20 buttons in my sleep w/o a manual!!


OK I'm WAY to young for this!!!


Dave

OH YEAH


Forgot to ask. (maybe i'm not so young)

How many have worked on the "gray whales"??


Dave

grey whales with the Tie 10S phone systems. it came equipped with a choice of 1,2 or 3 intercom paths, if you needed more CO lines, you could actually re-use all of the intercom paths and rewire the KSU for the additional lines required. system was extremely flexible and one of the first that I am aware of that did handsfree talkback. used a 50 pair cable and god forbid you removed the one lamp ground wire for the set. must be an east coast thing.

I thought the confidencer was the other way around, you placed one in the handset to cutout the background noise (ideal for motor shops)

anyone remember when 25 pair cable had a spare pair just for emergencies. what was the color? How about having to use a 4 x 8 5/8" piece of plywood just to mount all the 66 blocks that you needed for the 1A2 equipment and spending a week cutting down all those 25 pairs starting from the violet-slate pair up. (thats right, v/sl not purple grey, as my young techs refer to it.)

Sorry to say, but I thought the most valuable tool back them was a paper clip. found many uses for it.
ah, those were the days when a analog volt meter really meant something.
TJ

Yeah, my father's real estate office in New Jersey bought one of those systems in 1975. If I recall correctly, didn't it have an interrupter that was just a card with a bunch of different relays clicking all the time? And wasn't there a 50 pair cable with a special connector that plugged into the bottom of the KSU that fed the MDF blocks? And weren't intercom codes determined by picking one wire from each tens group and the other from the second digits, like a matrix?

The spare pair was white/red.

Paper clips; sure handy for taking off rotary dial wheels and number card covers. Personally, I just used a 5" piece of one-pair drop wire with about 1/2" stripped on one end. On the other end, I bent a tiny hook in the wire to be used as a probe-pic (nose picker).

One of the guys at my dad's work was a Bell tech for 18 years. He told me how with 1A2, it was a lot easier to troubleshoot

You just can't stump Ed! He must have been doing telecom in grade 3.

I think the spare was only in odd pic. I don't remember the color code we know now as having a spare, and I spliced a lot of it.

Uh, I hate to say it but I did watch the guy from UTS-Carolina Telephone replace the ringer coil in the green rotary dial phone in my parent's bedroom when I was seven. I think that would have actually been the second grade. I did have to ask him why it required four wires since only three came in through the line cord. He didn't have an answer, or at least one that he thought I would understand at that age. Of course that was back in the days where phones were rented, the phone company repaired them, and it was free.

Hey Bill, I saw the white/red pair a lot in old 25 pair pole terminals with lead stubs when doing splice repairs. I have seen a white/red AND a white/black spare pair in T-screened OSP cable recently, in fact we just installed about a mile of it.

I also still see this pair in some of the really old, as in 1950-1965 inside cable where it was available in brown or beige jacket and solid colors like PIC.

I am pretty sure that once band marking for pair identification became the norm in the mid 1960's for inside wiring, the spare pair went away.

Well maybe you are older than me Ed. Now that you mention it, I do kind of remember a spare in the lead terminal stubs. I never saw it in my splicing days in the cable its self and spliced very little of the odd count pic. Thanks for the info, one of these days we're going to stump ya.