I teach middle school in Kansas City, and one of my students is working on a science fair project that involves testing the working distance of cordless home phones.

We'd like to experiment at our school, but the school has a phone system where each room has its own extension on a large network (816-418-XXXX). Is it possible to use a cordless home phone on such a system and call it using the room extension? Phones really aren't my area of expertise, so any help will be greatly appriciated.

We would need to know what type of system is being used at the school to start

wow, i did a similar project back in the day, what i did, we just plugged the cordless phones into a stereo turned on the music and walked away from the base until we lost the music

Just to save you a whole lot of time & expense...

I did this with several models of phones in a field with the base in a house trying to decide which model to stock for my clients.

Different phones had different results, where some would cut out sooner than the others on receive, while some couldn't "receive a call", but be able to "Make a call" from the same spot. Go igure.

Even with identical phone models, the results varied. In other words, your results will be useless info in the end.

Way too many variables whether inside or out.

Dave, it's not for Consumer Reports, it's middle school!. This project sounds far better than many that I've seen. let the kid have his project.

Teach, just bring a phone from home and see if it works. If it does, you are home free. You can also instruct him to also research how different frequencies behave through walls, etc. Depending on the application, "bigger" is not always better.

Hi, Frank. More than likely, the phone in your classroom is just an analog extension, comparable to a standard home phone line. My suggestion would be to plug a standard cordless phone into this jack and check for dial tone. If this is present, you'll be able to dial calls from the cordless phone under test just as if it was your standard wired phone.

There is no "canned" answer to this question, however you should be able to experiment widely with different cordless phone models if the extension in your classroom truly is analog.

HI, Frank....

I do service work in KC....most of the schools on the KS side have Plexar from at&t....and use a Nortel digital set.

The few schools I worked in KCMO (by your telephone number) also had Plexar sets. Again, if the sets have a bunch of buttons and say Nortel, odds are it is a digital set. If it looks like a normal home phone you should be good to go.

If the sets say 3-Com, Polycom, or Cisco....well, you are out of luck. A lot of the smaller schools were being converted to 3-Com.

Check for a fax machine....their line will work with the home phone.

Just my luck....tomorrow afternoon I'll be at UMKC ... just another run to the "city".

Good luck.

:thumb:

Ken's idea is good - there has to be a fax machine in the school office. Does this project have to be done in the classroom proper, or could your student get access to the office? Another place you could plug in a standard telephone would be a line provided for a dial-up computer modem - you know, the old fashioned kind.

But the real question is, what about the people whose job it is to maintain and oversee the phone system for the school - are there people in the district's staff just for this? How nice they turn out to be is key. If they are kind, helpful people, they will do whatever is needed and get you hooked up right away. If they are the opposite, they might read you the riot act about touching any of "their" equipment and forbid the whole project outright. If it turns out to be the latter case, then your students will still have had a valuable learning experience... about bureaucracy.

Jim
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Speaking from a secure undisclosed location.

Wow. Plexar is still around. That name brings back fond memories of SWB and how squared away they were. Indiana Bell called that same service Centrex. Shoulda never left KC.

If all of the above fails you could use a VIK-DLE-200B simulator. The Comdial sales team always used them. It may be a lot of money for a school project but you may find one on E-bay.

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Well, when I left KC in 1989, the schools were moving toward Plexar, but they were putting either S/L phones or key systems in the actual school building. And I thought SWB called it Centrex when I worked with it. They did in Salina, KS.

If all else fails, the student will just have to do his experiment from a home. Let us know how it goes!