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King Radio KY 195B Aircraft Transceiver, 1975
What Happened To It? Radio engineer Ed King Jr. formed the company that went on to bear
his name back in 1948, initially producing components for other radio
manufacturers. He set up King Radio in 1959, close to Kansas City, and later
moved production to Olath in Kansas where it became a leading supplier of
avionics instruments to aircraft companies including Beechcraft, Cessna and
Piper. King radio pioneered the use of transistors and digital electronics in
affordably priced general and civil aviation avionics. In 1983 the company was
taken over by Allied Corp, at the same time it acquired another aircraft
instrument manufacturer Bendix Aviation to become part of Allied Signal, which
in turn merged with Honeywell. Ed King Jr. died in 2012 at the ripe old age of
90. Improvements in electronics and the constant demand for more comms capacity has resulted in a near tripling in the number of voice channels on the civilian aircraft communications band. It was accomplished by reducing channel frequency spacing from 25kHz to 8.33kHz. The changeover began in 2007 with large commercial aircraft required to carry 8.33kHz equipment. Since 2019 it has become the standard in UK and Europe for General Aviation aircraft. This was almost certainly the reason why this KY-195, and many other perfectly functional but elderly non 8.33 compliant radios were forced into retirement. Outside of Europe 25kHz radios are still widely used, which accounts for my broad estimation of its present value. In the US there are often to be found on ebay, in the small ads in aircraft magazines and at hugely popular Air Fairs, where good examples can fetch several hundred dollars. Back in the UK they are mostly of interest to collectors of vintage tech, aircraft instruments and so on and when they turn up prices tend to lean more towards the lower end of the scale. DUSTY DATA First Seen: 1975 Original Price: £? Value Today: £50 – £200 (0222) Features: Dual ‘Head’ transceiver, 720 VHF
channels, dual independent frequency selectors, 118 – 135.97MHz coverage (25kHz
spacing), crystal controlled, AM modulation, 5 watts RF output, 5 watts audio
output (50mW headphone out), auto squelch,
Power req. 13.8 volts DC Dimensions: 300 x 158 x 65mm Weight: 2.4kg Made (assembled) in: Olathe, Kansas USA Hen's Teeth (10 rarest) 8 Signal Corps GI Phone BC-611, 1995
What Happened To It? The G.I.Phone was made by a Hong Kong (now Chinese) based company
called Pollyflame Concepts, probably exclusively for the US market, where the
real BC-611 is a well known WW2 relic. The company is still in business but appears to have
switched from novelty phones to promotional products. This almost certainly
reflects the dramatic shift in the home phone market, from fixed line to
mobile, over the past three decades. The few G.I. Phones I have seen on US ebay have varied
in price from £25 to £150, and even the rough looking ones tend to get snapped up quite quickly. That
is to be expected, judging by how few of them come up for sale. This also suggests they they weren’t around for very long and demand is high thanks to a thriving market for vintage military, and
military-related items. Their rarity on this side of the pond probably doesn’t
do much for prices, though and given the steady decline in fixed line phones,
makes it less attractive to anyone looking for a useable instrument. I clearly
got very lucky with this one and would almost certainly get my money back if I
was ever disposed to sell it (I’m not). My guess is it could fetch at least £30 on
a good day, so if you see one in good shape for anything less it could be quite a good investment. DUSTY DATA First Seen: 1995? Original Price: £? Value Today: £30 (0521) Features: Novelty push-button phone with 10
number memory, hands-free operation, variable speaker and ring tone volume,
last number redial, switchable ringer & ringer light, mute, switchable
tone/pulse dial, in-use light, hinged metal control panel cover, detachable
fake rubber antenna cap, webbing wrist strap Power req.
line powered Dimensions: 270 x 265 x 100 Weight:
1.7kg Made (assembled) in: Hong Kong/China Hen's Teeth (10 rarest) 9 Labgear Handi-Call 2-station Intercom, 1962
A quick word on the date of manufacture. I can be reasonably
certain it was made in the early to mid 1960s. By then Bakelite had been
largely replaced by thermoplastics and the hand-built ‘tag board’ circuit is
typical of the time, but there were even better clues. The germanium
transistors it uses, made by a UK company called Newmarket, were discontinued
in the mid 1960s and there’s a price marking on the box of £9 15s 6d. This also
puts it into the sixties. Whilst the UK officially switched to decimal currency
in 1971, the conversion process had begun several years earlier with items
commonly priced in what was then known as the ‘new money’. What Happened To It? Stand-alone multi-station office intercoms started to disappear
from the mid 70s onwards as the function was increasingly integrated into
internal phone systems and PABXs (Private Automatic Branch Exchange). Also at
around this time the prices were falling, thanks to the impact of digital
electronics on all areas of communications technology. This spilled over into
the home and within a few years domestic intercoms would be replaced by cheap
multi-handset cordless phones, many of which had an internal call facility. A
few models lingered on, and to this day can be found in specialised
applications like baby alarms and entry phones. Intercoms from the 60s have yet to acquire any sort of novelty value in the mainstream collectors markets. To be honest most of the ones made at around that time are not that useful or visually striking. It is likely to be a while before vintage models become scarce or increase significantly in value, which, as usual is good news for some of us. Go back a few years, though and prices really start to perk up. Wooden cased items, like the Dictograph Master Console, and big old Bakelite jobbies with lots of buttons are obvious exceptions. Alas some of them suffer a terrible fate, being upcycled into table lamps and quirky ‘Nixie’ clocks, so it is your duty to save them while they can still be found in an unmolested virgin state! Toy intercoms also have quite a following, especially if they are tied in with cartoon characters, TV shows and movies. The Labgear Handi-Call deserves recognition too. It’s big and super-rare and almost certainly one of, if not the first British-made Intercom to use transistors, which must make it worth a bit more than a fiver. As is so often the case, there is an opportunity to get in on what will undoubtedly become the next big thing. If past experience teaches us anything, recently deceased technologies have a habit of suddenly becoming trendy, and expensive. Probably… `
DUSTY DATA First Seen: 1962 Original Price: £9 15s 6d (£9.78) Value Today: £10 (0421) Features: Two-station intercom, simplex
operation. Master Unit: 2-transistor (NKT 254/255) complimentary pair Class B
amplifier, push to talk switch, 75mm Fane speaker, on/off slide switch, screw
terminal for cable (2-core), fixed (internally adjustable) volume, Power req.
4 x 1.5 volt D cells Dimensions: 175 x 153 x 85mm (both units) Weight: 1kg (base station) 550g (slave) Made (assembled) in: England (Cambridge) Hen's Teeth (10 rarest) 9 Academy Y-WT 15 Walkie Talkies, 1980?
Power is supplied by one 9-volt PP3
type battery, which fits, into a compartment on the underside of the case. This pair came from ebay and, as is often the case, seems to have
slipped under the normally eagle-eyed vintage tech collector’s radar. There
were no other bidders and it was mine for the opening bid of £5.50. To put that
into perspective it was less than half what similar models currently (early 2021) sell for, given that
they were listed as being in good cosmetic condition and in working order. They
also came with a set of new batteries, which had to be worth a quid or two. The
description was accurate, though the ‘call’ buttons on both handsets were on
their last legs and needed replacing. Luckily they are standard 6mm micro
‘momentary’ tactile switches, that I had to hand, but even if I’d had to buy
them they would only have cost a pound or so. Both hansets needed a good clean up,
inside and out but, otherwise they were good to go and a brief test showed
speech quality to be reasonably good and the range upwards of 100 metres in
the open. What Happened To It? Walkie-talkies have come a very long way since the very first ones appeared in the mid 1930s. Until the late 50s their use was largely confined to military, law enforcement and industrial roles, then something remarkable happened. Almost overnight the transistor transformed the technology, from bulky metal boxes full of tiny valves -- something that only governments could afford -- into a cheap and cheerful mass-market product.
From the very beginning, in the UK at
least, the public was banned from using any sort of radio transmitter without a
licence. Bizarrely, until comparatively recently walkie talkies could be bought
and sold quite legally, you just weren’t allowed to use them. This didn’t stop
them selling in huge numbers, but their transient appeal, poor quality
construction and young, heavy handed users, meant that relatively few escaped
the rubbish bin. Character themed, TV show and movie linked models from the
1960s have always been popular, with prices to match, especially if they’re in
good condition and come with the original packaging. Later, plain looking
models like the Academy Y-WT 15 don’t have anything like the same appeal,
nevertheless they have a following and prices are unlikely ever to fall as they get
older and tidy working examples become harder to find. DUSTY DATA First Seen: 1980 Original Price: £10.00? Value Today: £20.00 (0221) Features: Analogue FM VHF transceiver,
half-duplex operation, single channel crystal controlled (49.831 Mhz), 6
transistor, 1 microchip, superhetrodyne
receiver, 10mW RF output, call function,
8 section telescopic antenna (1 metre fully extended), earphone socket
(3.5mm jack), LED PTT/Call indicator, electret microphone, 30mm ohm speaker,
rotary on/off volume control, lanyard, leather carry case Power req.
9 volt PP3 battery Dimensions: 165 x 52 x 28mm Weight:
150g Made (assembled) in: China Hen's Teeth (10 rarest) 6 Mehanoteknika Intercom, Iskra ATA 31, 1968?
What Happened To It? Iskra, which means spark in Slovenian, was founded in the late
1940s is still going strong. It started out making phones under licence from
Siemens. Nowadays they’re a global player in the telecommunications, security,
electrical components and energy markets. They don’t manufacture smart-looking
home telephones anymore but they do make a lot of the equipment that connects
and powers phone networks, and much more besides. Given that kids today appear to get their first smartphone within
weeks of birth it is a little surprising that toy, wire-connected
telephone-style intercoms are still being made. Production probably never
stopped and should you wish, you can find them on ebay and Amazon selling for
less than £15.00. The cost of this one when new is uncertain but a faded price
sticker on the box, written in the pre decimal style says ‘£3/-‘, so we’ll go
with that, even though it sounds a tad cheap. The fact that I paid £9.00 for
this one and I’ve seen others go for less than £30.00 indicates that they have
yet to become the desirable collectables they deserve to be. To be fair most
toy phones, even if they do date from the sixties are always going to be a
minority interest but this one is clearly a bit different. For the record an
original Iskra ATA 31 is an exhibit in the Science Museum Collection
and you’ll find them on ebay from time to time selling for between £40 and £60.
Some of the rarer models can set you back three-figure sums, so maybe there’s a
chance toy versions of this iconic phone will put on a few quid as the years
roll by? DUSTY DATA First Seen: 1968? Original Price: £3.00 Value Today: £10 (0520) Features: Two-way duplex operation, call
remote station feature with buzzer and light, carbon ‘transmitter’ (microphone),
magnetic ‘receiver’ (earpiece), dummy rotary dial call switch, 20 metre
connecting cable Power req: 4 x 1.5 volt D cells (2 per phone)
Dimensions: 145 x 145 x 65mm Weight: 400g Made (assembled) in: Slovenia (former Yugoslavia) Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 7 Homer KE-10 Miniature Transistor Intercom, 1967
Okay, let’s not get too carried away; the KE-10 is little more
than a glorified baby monitor. But that doesn’t take anything away from the
fact that modern equivalents, doing more or less the same basic job, cost
several times as much – even allowing for inflation – and use vastly more
sophisticated circuitry, though to be fair most of them do have a few extra
tricks up their sleeves….
Ebay was the source of this KE-10. It was accurately described as
complete, cosmetically okay, in its original box, but in non-working condition
and easy to see why it was a Buy It Now sale for just £4.50. At some
point in the last 50 years a battery had been left inside the Master unit and
inevitably it had leaked. Most of the caustic gunk had found its way onto, and
eaten away the battery connector. A small amount also ended up on the speaker frame
and the inside of the case. Overall it wasn’t too bad, though, and cleaning it all up
didn’t take very long. The battery connector was replaced, the speaker, which was
largely undamaged, just needed a few minutes worth of wire bushing with a
rotary tool, and after a complete strip-down the brown residue on the inside of
the case brushed off after a ten minute dip in warm vinegar. The last item to
be repaired was the connecting cable as the plugs at both ends had become
detached. A short length of cable had to be removed as it had been badly
damaged, probably by an encounter with a vacuum cleaner or tight fitting door.
The first power-on test was a disappointment, not a peep, but after replacing
the three electrolytic capacitors, which all measured leaky, and cleaning the
contacts on the two push button switches it came alive. What Happened To It?
Adverts for this and the numerous other models based around the
same or similar 2-transistor amplifiers continued for the next 10 years but by
then office intercoms and PABX systems had become cheaper, and a lot more
sophisticated, and baby alarms had started to go ‘wireless’. As far as I can make out 1960s intercoms are not, as yet, popular
collectables so there’s not a great deal of interest, or money to be made
squirreling a few away. That means that should you be so inclined and fancy
taking a punt on it taking off one day, it is not going to cost you much to get
collecting. Ebay is the place to start looking, at least until life returns to
normal (this was written in the midst of the Corvid 19 outbreak), and there’s
plenty to choose from costing from around £5.00 upwards. Whether or not you’ll
ever see a return on your investment remains to be seen, but speaking as things
stand at the moment, there’s bugger all else to do… DUSTY DATA First Seen: 1967 Original Price: £2.75 (55 shillings) Value Today: £15.00 (0420) Features: 2-transistor amplifier (50mW
output), simplex operation, rotary on/off switch, push to talk/signal button, 2
x 55mm speaker/microphones, 20-metre connecting cable with 2.5mm jack plugs Power req:
1 x PP9 9 volt battery Dimensions: 104 x 42 x 76mm Weight:
160g (master) 100g (sub station) Made (assembled) in: Japan Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 5 BC-611/SCR-536 Signal Corps ‘Handie-Talkie,
1941
The BC-611 you’ll immediately recognise from
the pix on the right and below as the ubiquitous US Army hand-held field radio of
WW2. Like the Jeep it has featured
prominently in countless movies and TV shows and became an enduring example of
American ingenuity. Also, like the famous off-road vehicle, it made its mark on
the English language, coining the word ‘walkie-talkie’ (though originally it
was known as a ‘handie-talkie’).
As you can see this one has had quite an
eventful life, as befits something that is getting on for 80 years old and may
well have seen active service. I acquired it a couple of years ago, exchanging it
for some vintage radio gear, with a fellow collector. It was an abandoned
restoration project, but as far as I could see hardy anything had been done, though it had been scavenged for parts. It came without any valves,
crystals or coils. The antenna switch linkage was broken, there was
considerable damage to some of the contacts on the switch plate but otherwise
it was in pretty good condition. I fully intended to finish off the restoration
but after listing all the missing components, and totting up how much they
would all cost, it was put to one side. Getting it working again is
theoretically possible but it would be a long and costly exercise. On the other
hand it would be quite easy to spruce up the case and have it looking like
almost new again but I’ve resisted the temptation. That would be a mistake.
Every scratch and dent has a tale to tell and is a part of this radio’s long
and unique history. What Happened To It? You don’t have to look far in dustygizmos to
see what happened next in US Army field communications. The BC-611 was replaced
by the AN/PRC-6 (aka Green Banana or Prick 6) in the 1950s and this model
served in both the Korean and Vietnam wars and other conflicts up until the
early 70s. They look quite similar and share a lot of instantly recognisable
design features. Both units also use valves and the performance is broadly the
same, but the PRC-6 was the last of the line as transistors and eventually
digital electronics revolutionised military communications. Large numbers of decommissioned BC-611s found
their way onto the civilian market in the 50s and 60s, often for just a few
dollars. Amateur radio enthusiasts snapped up a lot of them as they could be
easily converted to operate on civilian frequencies. By the 1970s sources of
cheap BC-611 had largely dried up, just as new markets opened up. They became
increasingly popular with collectors of vintage military equipment, WW2 re-enactment clubs and societies, and
inevitably prices for the dwindling supplies started to soar. Although they
were manufactured in comparatively large numbers, and not just by Motorola --
many thousands were also produced under licence by factories in the US and
Europe -- the ones that have survived are now mostly held in collections
and museums. When occasionally they come on the market, and ebay is one of the
few places you will find them in the UK, they generally sell for between £200
and £500, depending on condition. There are some very convincing replicas doing
the rounds, one in particular is very close to the original, until you look
inside the case, which has been kitted out with a modern walkie-talkie. There
are also BC-11 ‘inspired’ telephones and a great many toys that have come and
gone over the years. However, a genuine original is the only one worth having
if you want a truly iconic piece of Second World militaria and a genuinely
innovative example of mid twentieth century technology. DUSTY DATA First Seen: 1941 Original Price: £? Value Today: £250.00 (1019) Features: AM Short Wave
transceiver (3.5 – 6.0 MHz), 360mW RF output, single channel crystal-controlled
frequency selection, 5-valves (1 x VT-471, 1 x VT-472, 1 x VT-473, 2 x VT-474).
integral microphone and earphone, press to talk (PTT) switch, telescopic
antenna with integral on/off switch, adjust able carry strap, operating range 30 metres – 1.6km (100 feet
– 1 mile) depending on terrain Power req. BA-37 1.5v filament supply battery pack & BA-38 103v HT supply
battery pack Dimensions:
420 x 125 x 95mm Weight: 2.6kg Made (assembled) in: USA Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 8 National Standphone Intercom, 1970?
It is possible the Standphone was produced in
other configurations, with multiple Substations working with a central Base
Station. However, there’s no evidence of this on the web -- at least none that
I could find – or anything else for that matter. In fact there’s nothing to
suggest that it ever existed, let alone anything like model variation, the
original price and so on and the many gaps in this story are now waiting to be
filled by someone more knowledgeable.
What Happened To It? The suggested manufacturing date of 1968 might
be off by 5 years either way but there other clues, like the National name
badge. National, one of the sub brands of the mighty Matsushita Corporation,
was used on most products of this type until the mid to late 1970s after which
it became National Panasonic. National was dropped in the 80s and it became
simply Panasonic. Normally it’s fairly easy to pin down National’s consumer products
but this particular one was probably not widely marketed. It may even have been
distributed by one of its more specialist divisions, hence the lack of
information on the web, so the price, like the date is also a guessimate. Its value today is basically what I paid for it, as there have been no others -- which I am aware of -- to compare it with. It is possible there are more out there but even if there are the demand for them, and most other intercoms from that era tend to generate little excitement, making it an area ripe for anyone want to get into collecting vintage tech. I’m the first to admit that collecting old intercoms is an acquired taste but having seen so many other old and forgotten technologies suddenly -- and sometimes inexplicably -- acheive collectible status, and soar in price, now would be a good time to get involved. There are still plenty of them on ebay but I’m pleased to say, the Standphone appears to be in a class of its own. DUSTY DATA First Seen: 1968? Original Price: £ 20.00 Value Today: £ 20.00 (0719) Features: 2-station one-piece
phone-style transistorised intercom, duplex operation, ‘call’ button, base
mounted line switch, 18-metre, 2-core cable with plug connections Power req. 4 x 1.5v C cells (2 per station) Dimensions:
215 x 8 x 90mm Weight: 500g Made (assembled) in: Japan Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 9 Realistic TRC-503 5-Channel Transceiver, 1989
This pair caught my eye at a local car boot
sale. They appeared to be in excellent condition and even had their original --
though somewhat battered -- boxes and instructions. The stallholder was asking
a modest £4.00 for the pair and the clincher was the fact that they came with
batteries so they could be shown to be working; and they did. No haggling
necessary and the two fresh batteries were worth half the asking price. For
once they didn’t even need a clean up. It looked as though they had only been
used a couple of times, spending the majority of the past thirty or so years in
their boxes. Everything worked, sound quality is entirely adequate for speech
and the range, although nowhere near the claimed quarter mile, was still a bit
further than you could shout and therefore potentially quite useful in a few
very undemanding situations, like a two-handed scouting mission at a car boot
sale, for example... What Happened To It? A quick word on Realistic, which, as old-timers
and regular visitors to dustygizmos will know was one of Tandy’s house brands.
Tandy Electronics was the UK division and franchise of the once mighty US Radio
Shack Corporation. Alas Tandy, which until 1999 had a presence on almost every
British high street is no more. The US parent company is now just a shadow of
its former self, trading mainly as an on-line concern, with only a few stores
and concessions remaining. Personal short-range two-way communications first
took off in the mid seventies with the brief CB radio fad. Initially there was
only illegal in-car ‘rigs’ and hand-held transceivers, imported from the US and
Europe. They used part of the 27MHz (Short Wave) band, split into 40 channels
and employing AM modulation. The problem was this part of the radio spectrum
was already occupied, by radio control modellers, who, along with other
legitimate users of the band were somewhat irritated by the interference CBers
generated. At one point they were even being accused of threatening the lives
of people fitted with heart pacemakers… Government attempts to catch and
prosecute 27MHz AM CB users were largely ineffective and in response to public
pressure in 1981 it introduced an entirely new licence-free FM system,
imaginatively called Open Channel. This operated over 20 channels at a much higher
frequency (928MHz) but at significantly lower power levels than illicit AM CB.
Needless to say it was useless and a complete flop. In any event interest in CB
was on the wane; the legal and illegal CB bands had become home to cranks and
idiots and children’s playground, making it unusable for anyone actually
needing a simple short-range, point-to-point communications system. And cell
phones were also just around the corner. The MPT 1336 system couldn’t fill the
gap; it simply had too many limitations. The net result was that walkie-talkies,
other than cheap toys and novelties, and professional high-end systems
requiring a licence, effectively disappeared until the introduction of the
PRM446 system a few years later. Vintage walkie-talkies have recently become
quite collectable and the big money is being paid for 60s and 70s models linked
with iconic movies, TV shows, characters and cartoons. For example a pair of
original Thunderbirds walkie-talkies in good condition could set you back £500
or more! The Realistic 503s are from a different era though, and in spite of
their comparative rarity are, at this stage, worth little more than I paid for
them. I don’t hold out much hope for them ever being much of an investment but
they’re still interesting for being yet another one of those forgotten backwaters
of the tech revolution of the last century and deserve at least a few lines in
the footnotes of its history. DUSTY DATA First Seen: 1989 Original Price: £39.99 Value Today: £10.00 (0719) Features: VHF FM operation,
5-channels (49.830, 49.845, 49.860, 49.875, 49.890MHz), crystal stabilisation,
call function, automatic squelch, 7-section telescopic antenna, rotary volume
on/off, channel selection belt clip Power req. 1 x 9 volt PP3 Dimensions:
155 x 66 x 30mm Weight: 180g Made (assembled) in: Philipines Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 5 BT Kingfisher 203A Answering Machine,
1986
I probably shouldn’t have
listened to the message tape that came with this BT Kingfisher 230A telephone
answering machine (TAM), but it was compelling stuff. It also left a lot of questions
unanswered, like what happened to Andrew and Julia at Bristol Airport, and who
was Emily’s real father?
What Happened To It? The first practical telephone answering
machines date from the 1940s, which is more recent than you might suppose,
considering phones and audio recording devices had been around since the late
1800s. Credit and disputed patents for the first, not so practical telephone answering
contraptions are variously attributed to messrs. Ludwig Blattner in 1929,
William Schergens in 1931 and Bell Laboratories in 1935. The jury is out as to
who was really first, but the first model to actually go on sale was the
Tel-Magnet, in the US in 1949. It wasn’t a success but later the same year
another US company launched the Electronic Secretary, which did sell. It
combined a gramophone for the OGM and a magnetic wire recorder for the incoming
messages. Phonetel, the company behind the legendary Ansaphone brand began
producing TAMs in the US in the 1960. Magnetic tape recording systems for OGMs and
ICMs became the norm from the early sixties onwards, thanks largely to the
success of the Compact Cassette, and a little later, the Micro Cassette formats.
They became increasingly sophisticated and a few models even managed to get by
with a single cassette. The OGM is recorded at the beginning of he tape and the
machine automatically fast-winds to the next segment of blank tape to record
the ICM. By the late 70s digital technology started to
take over, initially with tape deck control logic then simple solid-state
recording circuitry for the OGM and finally entirely solid state OGM and ICM
message recording. Later in the 80s TAMs found their way in fax machines but
gradually, as telephone networks were digitised, cellphone technology advanced
and mobile handsets fell in price, the job of recording messages, or rather
voicemail, as we call it now, was taken over by the phone companies and by the
early noughties it became obvious that the days of the stand-alone TAM had come
to an end. If you are looking for a future collectible to help boost your pension pot then vintage telephone answering machines could be a strong candidate. Currently models from the 70s and 80s are quite cheap and relatively plentiful. This Kingfisher 230A was a high-end model, originally costing £149.00 (1987 Argos catalogue) and would probably sell now for as much as £10 on ebay, but the ones that are most likely to appreciate most in value in the coming years are early models from the 1960s. Prices are rising steadily with some rather optimistic sellers asking three figure sums; and they will probably get there, eventually... The Holy Grail, though, is equipment from the 40s and 50s. It is not inconceivable that the odd one will end up at a car boot sale or antique fair, so if you spot one, even if it is only in poor or salvageable condition, at a fair price, grab it. DUSTY DATA First Seen: 1986 Original Price: £150.00 Value Today: £10.00 (0419) Features: Twin
cassette tape incoming & outgoing message (1 x standard, 1 x 30 sec endless
loop), answer only mode, call counter indicator, voice operated stop recording,
line break stop, 2 or 4 ring answer, call monitoring, call timer, built-in
microphone, pay tone detection, full tape detect, coded remote control &
volume adjust, fast tape erase, auto line release (when phone handset in use) fast forward & rewind, earphone
socket, power fail indicator Power req. 17-volts DC (via
external mains adaptor) Dimensions:
240 x 185 x 55mm Weight: 1.4kg Made (assembled) in: Japan Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 8 15-Station Desk Intercom, 1940?
This desk intercom has been in my mish-mash of
a telephone collection for at least 25 years. I have no recollection of where
it came from and how much I paid for it but at the time I rarely paid more than
a couple of pounds for these things. The condition is fair to good, showing the
inevitable signs of wear and tear.
There are a few light scratches and paint chips on the case but the
innards look as though they were made yesterday. Such was the quality of
manufacture, and the reliability of the major components that I have no doubt
whatsoever that it still works. However, apart from some basic checks on the
earpiece (receiver) and microphone (transmitter), without access to another
phone like this, or the equipment it used to be connected to, there is no easy
way to properly test it. What Happened To It? Everything about the design and styling points
towards it being made somewhere between the late 30s to mid 50s but there are
no obvious maker’s marks, apart from Ericsson embossed on the underside of the
handset handle. There’s what may be a model or serial number printed on the
inside of the back plate. For the record it’s ‘N 1622 A’, and there’s a couple
of square boxes, which look a lot like quality control stamps, on the chassis that
read ‘Test 6 Room’ and ‘Test 23 Room’; make of that what you will. In the wider world of vintage multi-station
office intercoms the basic design doesn’t seem to have changed very much until
the late 50s. By that time intercoms with banks of individual push-buttons were
being replaced by more familiar looking phones with rotary dials. Part of the
reason for that is larger businesses and organisations were increasingly using
PABX (Private Automatic Branch Exchange) systems, which meant tidier desks as a
single instrument could be used for making both internal and external calls. Vintage phone collectors, and it’s quite a big
thing, especially in the US, are natural magpies and many of them also seek out
oddball designs like office phones and intercoms. Not knowing the name of the
manufacturer makes putting a value on this one quite difficult but I am
reasonably sure it would fetch upwards of £25.00 or so on ebay, possibly more
with a more detailed provenance. Some models, like wooden-boxed Dictographs can
fetch twice as much and there are probably even more sought after models out
there but either way, don’t pass up the chance if you spot one like this at a
car boot sale going for a fiver or so. Providing they haven’t been too badly
treated they’ll generally clean up quite well, and even if the only thing worth
salvaging is the handset -- especially if it’s one like this and in good
condition -- as it still has a value – between £10 and £20 – to collectors and
restorers for spare parts. DUSTY DATA First Seen: 1940? Original Price: £? Value Today: £25? (1218) Features 15
self-latching station selector keys, call buzzer, handset cradle, magnetic
earpiece, carbon microphone, cotton covered braid cable Power req.
n/a line-powered Dimensions:
220 x 155 x 170mm Weight: 2.7kg Made (assembled) in: Britain? Hen's Teeth (10 rarest) 7 Fonadek 5M4 Telephone Amplifier, 1968
Some celebrity endorsements aren’t so easily
bought, though. Arguably the most exclusive one is the ‘By Royal Appointment
Warrant awarded to products favoured by the British Royal Households. It’s no
good sending their Highnesses fancy widgets or back-handers on the off chance
of a mention on HRH’s Twitter feed or the Buck House Facebook page. To apply
for a Royal Warrant one of the senior royals must have been using the goods or
services concerned for at least 5 years.
Apart from the remains of the Duke of
Edinburgh’s warrant crest on the edge of the case I think it unlikely that this
one has any other Royal connections. Stranger things have happened but it’s a
long way from Buckingham Palace to the cardboard box full of junk at a Midlands
antique fair where I found this one. I almost didn’t see it; the dirty dark
green finish was an effective camouflage colour, but the odd shape caught my
eye and the pyramid-shaped speaker attached to it confirmed my suspicions.
Displaying goods in damp cardboard boxes is often a fair indicator of what a
stallholder thinks their wares are worth, and I wasn’t disappointed, or
inclined to haggle over the ‘couple of quid’ asking price.
What Happened To It? Fonadek International Ltd, later Fonadek
(Branson) Ltd, are a bit of a mystery. There are only a few odds and ends about
the company’s history on the web so as usual I would be grateful to anyone who can
fill in the many blanks. The (so far) known facts can be boiled down to them
being founded around June 1950, according to records at Company’s House and
they were located in Vivian Road in Birmingham. They appear to have stayed
there until August 1982, or thereabouts, which was when they last filed
accounts, and the trail goes cold. During that time I estimate they produced
around half a dozen telephone amplifiers models and a quirky desktop message
system, called Permapad. The earliest telephone amps were valve-based with built-in
speakers; the one featured here is most likely a first or second-generation
transistor version. I’ve dated it to around 1965, based on the types of transistors
used (introduced a year or so earlier). Later models, probably made during the
70s and 80s, appear to be made largely of plastic, with horizontal, rather than
upright cradles. I suspect Fonadek struggled for several years; I can find no
record of what this telephone amplifier originally sold for but I would be surprised
if it was less than £30 to £40, which would have been a fair sum back then. Competition
from cheap far-eastern products, like this Homer KIT-505, which sold for £3, 2s
(£2.10) first appeared in the mid 1960s and would have grabbed a large chunk of
what would have been a comparatively small market especially amongst consumers
and office users. By the late 70s phones with built-in speakers were starting
to appear and Royal Warrant or not, there were just not enough well equipped
offices, captains of Industry and wealthy toffs to make expensive high-end
models like the Fonadek viable. By rights such an unusual and apparently highly
regarded instrument should be worth a few bob but the few I’ve seen on ebay are
typically priced at between £10 and £20, with very few takers. Phone collectors
and retro tech like this sort of thing, though, and I can imagine upcyclers
eyeing it up as the base of a table lamp. I fully expect to see a butchered
example selling for a three-figure sum in a trendy furniture shop, but rest
assured this one will be preserved for in its natural state for future generations
to enjoy (unless I get a really good offer…) DUSTY DATAFirst Seen: 1968 Original Price: £30 - £40? Value Today: £10.00 (0918) Features: 5-transistor amplifier,
magnetic pickup, 8-cm 8-ohm Richard Allen speaker, parabolic reflector, volume
& sensitivity controls Power req. 9v PP9 battery Dimensions: 250 x 140 x 130mm (main
unit), 170 x 98 x 106mm (ext speaker) Weight: 1.4kg (main unit), 700g (ext
speaker) Made (assembled) in: UK Hen's Teeth (10 rarest) 7 BT Inphone Slimtel 10 HT2A, 1985
The original Slimtel 1 design had what was then
an innovative one-handed ‘Easy Dial’ button that let the user key in a number
whilst the handset was resting on a desk or table. Unfortunately it didn’t have
a built in-speaker so unless you craned your head over the earpiece you couldn’t
hear if it was dialling or being answered. The model featured here was its
hastily revised replacement, launched in 1985. The Easy Dial and last number
recall functions had been replaced by a tricky 10-number memory that relied on
the user remembering, or writing down what was stored in each memory
location.
On the plus side it is quite sturdily built and
the phone functions all perform well enough, though the memory probably
wouldn’t have got much use due to the lack of a display. By the way, contrary
to appearance the keypad isn’t a touch-tone design; back in the early 80s
telephone exchanges were still in the process of being upgraded to digital
operation. Instead it uses a pulse dial system, which replicates the stream of
pulses produced by a rotary dial. It’s compatible with digital exchanges but
the lack of Hash and Star Key functions severely limits it use. It was found languishing in a cardboard box at
a large antique fair in Surrey. It appeared to be in fair condition so I was
pleasantly surprised by, and didn’t bother haggling over, the £1.50 asking
price. Underneath the usual coating of dirt the case and cable looked almost as
new and plugging it into a phone socket confirmed that it was in full working
order, as was the shrill, strident electronic ringer. Dismantling it to check
and clean the insides and take photos turned out to be a bit of a nightmare,
though. It came apart easily enough but getting it back together took a good
half an hour. The problem was that switch, and in particular the return spring,
which pinged out as soon as the top PCB was removed from its support pins. It
took a while to work out how it fitted together and when eventually I did,
wrangling the spring and jiggling the PCB back into position required at least
one extra hand. My advice for anyone thinking about poking around inside one of
these phones is take a photo before you separate the parts; better still, leave
it alone, unless you have to. What Happened To It? BT wisely decided not to design any more one-piece phones in-house, though it was by no means the first or last model they supplied and they are still around, though nowadays they’re mostly cordless models. The Slimtel 1 is the rarer of the two and by rights should be the more valuable version. They’re easy to spot with a black Easy Dial button positioned between the microphone and keypad. Slimtel 10s are not exactly common either and that should also help with prices, but the few 1s and 10s I have seen on ebay tend to generate little interest. If you are patient you should be able to pick one up for under £10; £25 and above buys a near-mint example, hopefully with its original box and instructions. I would like to think that prices will go up but it doesn’t seem likely. Sadly the Slimtel lacks the kudos and style of its more successful contemporaries and it just doesn’t look that interesting, despite just about qualifying as a vintage phone.
DUSTY DATAFirst Seen: 1984 Original Price: £? Value Today: £10 (0718) Features: One piece design, last
number recall, 10-number memory, digital keypad (pulse dialling), electronic
‘ringer’. Power req. n/a line-powered Dimensions: 224 x 90 x 54mm Weight: 300g Made (assembled) in: UK Hen's Teeth (10 rarest) 7 Field Telephone Set J, 1960
This one had clearly never seen
service, let alone spent any time in a field. It was and still is in almost
as-new condition, which suggests it has been in storage for most of its life.
The only marks are probably due to periodic stock movement and testing. I
checked it with another, much tattier, Telephone Set J I picked up a few years
ago and both of them are in working condition, not that there is much to go
wrong. However, without a supply of D8 cable it’s hard to say if it can still
manage a 20 – 30 mile cable run, but that is unlikely to be something that
changes with age. As a matter of interest the magneto can give you quite a
nasty tickle; my voltmeter measures between 60 and 80 volts on the L1 & L2
terminals, depending how fast it is cranked. There are plausible stories that
field telephones – not necessarily this model -- have been used as instruments
of torture, being a handy way to deliver painful shocks. What Happened To It? If anyone has compiled a detailed history of British Army field telephones I have yet to find it, and if one does exist please let me know as I am keen to fill in the many gaps in my knowledge. A few facts have come to light though, and this model was standard military issue in several countries, including Canada and Australia, and doubtless others with close ties to the UK. The earliest reference to the Set J I have found so far is a War Office instruction leaflet published in 1945. It’s closest relative in terms of design and layout seems to be Set L. This was clearly an earlier design but the L in this case allegedly stands for ‘Lightweight’ rather than any indication of model progression.
There is no indication of who made it, either on the unit or anywhere on the web but it was probably one of a number of approved military contractors, working to a very precise MOD specification. Set J appears to be one of the last of the line at least as far as basic, non-amplified, cabled field telephones are concerned. During the mid 80s my guess is the Ministry of Defence procured some stop-gap replacements for the J Set from Pye but by then fixed-line phones had been largely replaced by radio systems for personal and vehicle field communications.
Vintage field telephones are definitely
collectible but there is no clear pattern as to what they are worth, judging by
the wide selection of models appearing on ebay and occasionally turning up at
car boot sales and antique fairs. They vary from the absurdly optimistic to
cheap-as-chips, sometimes for genuine rarities. Should you be in the market for
one Telephone Set J’s can be found for anywhere between £10 and £80. This is
often irrespective of condition, so the simplest thing to say is be patient.
I’ve put a value of £25 on mine as it is in a clean and apparently unused
condition. It is by no means unusual, though, and sooner or later there will be
one to your liking with your name (and price tag) on it. DUSTY DATAFirst seen: 1945 Original Price: £? Value Today: £25 (0518) Features: portable field
telephone, 2-wire connection, hand cranked generator/magneto, internal
bell/buzzer, handset with push-to-talk (PTT) switch, call & bell cut-out
switch, external handset connections, carry strap lugs Power req. Central Battery (CB) or
mag powered and 2 x 1.5 volt Dry X Mk II batteries Dimensions: 265 x 150 x 125mm Weight: 3.7kg Made (assembled) in: Britain Hen's Teeth (10 rarest) 5 Companion CR-313 Walkie Talkies, 1964
The Companion CR-313 outfit was by no means
special. It was one of hundreds of walkie-talkie sets on the market in the
early 60s. Most of them, like this one, operated on a small portion of the
Short Wave band, around 27MHz, set aside for Citizen’s Band radio. This was,
and still is a set of frequencies used for local two-way radio communications,
that anyone could use, with minimal regulation or formalities or the need to
have a transmitting licence. They have just two controls, a volume, on/off
thumbwheel, and a press-to-talk (PTT) switch on the side. The loudspeaker
doubles up as a microphone; each unit has a 9-section telescopic antenna, and
they are powered by 9-volt PP3 transistor radio type battery. It really doesn’t
get much simpler than that.
As it happens they did, after an extensive
strip-down and clean up. Unusually for a 60s vintage electronic device the
electrolytic capacitors didn’t need replacing and the only maintenance needed
was a few squirts of switch cleaner to get rid of pops and crackles from the
PTT switch and volume control. One of the aerials had lost its ball tip; I just
happened to have a spare in my box of bits, and there had been a minor battery
leak at some point. Luckily the only damage was to the foam pad it sat on, and
again this was easily replaced. I doubt very much that the current range sound
quality is significantly different to what it was when new, and needless to say
neither is going to win any prizes, but let’s not forget that it manages to
send and receive intelligible voice communications using just a few cheap
components. Anyone familiar with old school electronics should be able to
understand how it works, and like most pre-digital gadgets, stand a very fair
chance of fixing it, should anything go wrong, with nothing more complicated
than a multimeter, screwdriver and a soldering iron. What Happened To It? Cheap toy walkie talkies have been a hardy
perennial since the early sixties and since 1981 we have even been allowed to
use them, following the introduction of a poorly thought out Citizen’s Band
radio system in the UK. Before that even very short range models like these
CR-313s were technically illegal, though they were sold openly and generally
tolerated by the authorities since they were difficult to detect and rarely
caused problems (though pilots of radio control model aircraft, which use the
same frequency, may well disagree). The current generation of inexpensive legal
‘consumer’ walkie talkies operate on multiple channels on UHF band, have many
flashy features, like LCD displays, winky lights and a range of between 3 and
5km, but where’s the fun in that? Collecting cheap vintage walkie-talkies isn’t
yet a big thing, though models like the CR-313 fall into the toy category,
where things can get a bit expensive. The undoubted stars are themed feature
and character models, linked to movies, TV shows, personalities and so on.
However, the high prices, and this is important, depend almost entirely on them
being in near mint condition and complete with their original box and
packaging. The only people these CR-313s are going to excite are a few elderly
vintage tech-nuts, like me, and maybe a handful of Baby-Boomers who remember
owing them the first time around. They’re undoubtedly worth a little bit more
than the £1.00 I paid for them but since a lot of similar (and even better)
non-themed examples turn up at car boot sales for not much more, it will be a
very long time before they get a gasp from an Antiques Roadshow audience. DUSTY DATAFirst Seen: 1964 Orginal Price: £3 19s 11d (£3.99) Value Today: £10.00 (0518) Features: 3-transistor
crystal-controlled transceiver circuit (27.124MHz Short Wave/CB operation),
55mm speaker/microphone, approx 500m range, 9-section telescopic antenna (1.13m
fully extended), push-to-talk (PTT) button, rotary volume on/off control Power req.
2 x 9-volt PP3
batteries Dimensions:
140 x 65 x 32mm (ex.
antenna) Weight: 180g Made (assembled) in: Japan Hen's Teeth (10 rarest) 6 Mehanotehnika Intercom Telephone 1973
The two stations are roughly three-quarter size
replicas of domestic telephones, complete with rotary dials that are used to
‘call’ the other station. Although this appears to be a very basic function,
routing call and two-way audio traffic through a two-core cable is a
surprisingly complicated business involving a fair amount of what we now call
logic, yet it achieves this using just a couple of simple switches and some
ingenious wiring. These days it would all be handled by a microcontroller, at
the very least.
According to the stallholder at the Kent car
boot sale where I found them, they started the day with a £10 asking price.
That would have been fair, had it not rained stair rods in the half hour before
I arrived. What started out as a nice little outfit, complete with its original
cardboard box, now looked a very sorry sight indeed. The box had almost
disintegrated in the downpour and in the stallholder’s haste to pack his more
precious wares away, the cable and instructions it allegedly started out with
had vanished. Clearly he’d had enough and the price of everything left floating
in the mud had been reduced to £1.00. Not wishing to add to his misery by
haggling I paid my pound and scooped the soggy mess into a carrier bag. As it
turned out the casualty list was fairly short, with the box being the only part
of the package beyond help.
Finding a pair of direct replacement
microphones for this vintage toy would be difficult, and probably quite
expensive. Working carbon mikes scrounged from old phones might be persuaded to
fit but I thought I would have a go at fixing them myself. As it turned out it
wasn’t as difficult as I feared. The front and rear parts of the mike capsule
are held together by fold-over metal tabs and once they are separated it is
possible to gently lift the diaphragm assemblies out of the rubber cupped metal
pots containing the fine granules. I emptied the contents of both capsules onto
a clean sheet of paper and placed in the oven (150 degrees C) for around 15
minutes. I would like to say all this had been carefully researched or worked
out but the truth is the time and temperature were just guesswork. Fortunately
it seemed to work and the sticky granules came out of the oven as a fine loose
dust. I carefully poured them back into the containers and the capsules were
re-sealed. It was a partial success. One of the mikes
worked quite well, the other was barely audible. It’s possible that the
division of granules wasn’t quite equal, or the contact surfaces of the duff
mike might be tarnished, but taking them apart again risks breaking the metal
tabs that hold the parts together, so it’s on the to-do list and at least I
know that the phones can be made to work. What Happened To It? The manufacturers, Mehanotehnika, were founded
in the early 1950s, and according to the company’s archived history, the name
came from the first toy they made, which happened to be a puzzle. Throughout
the late 50s and sixties numerous other toys and games followed; details are a
tad skimpy but apparently they were produced with ‘superior psychological and
pedagogical content’… Stamps on the bases of both phone show that they were
made in 1973 and it seems to be the part of a move to more sophisticated
mechanical and electrical toys. In 1990 the company changed its name to Mehano
and by this time it had become a highly regarded manufacturer of model trains,
which it continues to make to this day. Bizarrely this is in spite of the
company being declared bankrupt in 2008, following a decade of declining
profits and mounting debts. Toy telephone style intercoms used to be fairly
common though they tended to fizzle out in the 80s as most kids, and parents,
would have regarded them as rather old fashioned. In any case by that time
there were much more exciting ways for children, and big kids, to communicate.
Walkie talkies had been around since the early 60s and the market was awash
with cheap, mostly character or TV show themed models, aimed at pre-teens. These
were technically illegal but tolerated as they operated at very low power levels
but at around this time the brief craze for Citizen’s Band radio had begun to
take hold. More sophisticate and powerful walkie talkies started filling the
shelves, and eventually a sanitised system was legalised in the UK but the
novelty quickly wore off as rival attractions, like video games and electronic
toys began their apparently unstoppable takeover. Mehanotehnika/Mehano Intercom Telephones from
the 70s turn up on ebay fairly regularly, though all of the ones I have seen
so far were clean and boxed examples. Most of them were in good working
order and priced at between £30 to £50. This one, in its current partially
working state is probably only going to fetch between £5 and £10, for spares or
repair but this is an area where bargains can still be found and there is clear potential for bargain hunters and collectors. DUSTY DATAFirst Seen:: 1973 Orginal Price:
£5.00? Value Today:
£5.00 – £50.00 (0418) Features:
Two-station
intercom/telephone, buzzer and signal lamp, rotary dial, handset plunger,
magnetic earphones & carbon microphones, 10 metre connecting cable. Power req.
4 x 1.5 volt D cells Dimensions:
128 x 153 x 95mm Weight: 280g Made (assembled) in: Yugoslavia
(Slovenia) Hen's Teeth (10 rarest)
6 TR Gooseneck Microphone, 1965?
What Happened To It? The roots of Telephone Rentals date back to the
start of World War 1 and the formation of the Telephone Manufacturing Company.
TMC was set up to make and supply phones to a number of telephone companies
operating in Britain that had previously relied on instruments manufactured in
Germany. TMC’s first factory in Dulwich grew rapidly, but suffered a serious
reversal during the depression and was split into manufacturing and rental
divisions, one of which became Telephone Rentals. TR’s fortunes improved with
the coming of WW II with lucrative government contracts and for a while it included
Tannoy equipment in its list of products. More factories were opened in
Canterbury and Malmsbury to meet the demand. After the War TR expanded into overseas
markets and growth continued until the mid 1960s when it took over Dictograph
telephones, giving it a foothold in digital telephone exchange systems. TR
prospered well into the 1980s but following a succession of mergers, buyouts
and closures it became a shadow of its former self. As far as I can see TR ceased
trading in or around 2003, which, according to company records is when it last
filed accounts. Clearly desktop gooseneck microphones haven’t
gone away. There are scores, if not hundreds, of different designs on the
market, though for the most part they have morphed in to thin, spindly
insubstantial looking things, mostly made of plastic and unlikely to still be
around in 10 years, let alone the 50 to 60 years this one has survived. That makes
it special, and seemingly quite rare, but sadly not especially valuable, at
least not yet. As it stands the £10 I paid for it was about right, but I’m in
no hurry to sell it. Vintage microphones have become highly collectable, however. Many models,
especially high-performance examples, made for broadcasting and recording
studios, can fetch eye-watering sums. It’s a fascinating subject, old mikes can
be things of beauty and clever collectors and dealers can make a lot of money
out of them. But it’s also a minefield for the unwary, littered with replicas,
copies and fakes, so if you are thinking of getting involved, do your
homework! DUSTY DATA#First seen: 1965 Original Price:
£? Value Today:
£10.00 (0218) Features:
detachable low impedance (18 ohm) magnetic microphone, red & white
cue lights (12 volt), press button switch, flexible gooseneck, weighted base Power req. n/a Dimensions: base: 120 x 75mm, neck:
160mm, mike: 80 x 35mm Weight:
900g Made (assembled) in: England Hen's Teeth (10 rarest) 8 Tohphonic HP-2T 2-Station Intercom, 1962
Ebay was the source of this one, and with no
other bidders in contention it was mine for the starting price of £4.50. The
condition of the two units was very good indeed with only minimal signs of use,
suggesting it was only ever used as a baby alarm before ending up in long-term
storage. The cable hadn’t been so lucky, though, and after its brief career it
had been loosely wound, kinks and all. Over the years the plastic in the kinked
sections became brittle and split. In short it was unsalvageable. The amplifier
circuit showed some signs of life when powered up but it was horribly noisy and
unstable, pointing to the failure of at least one, and probably more
electrolytic capacitors. Rather than try to find the ones responsible I elected
to replace the lot as any that were still working were well past their use by
date and would eventually go short or open circuit. There are only five of them
and they’re all common values so it didn’t take too long and at the end of it,
it was working as well as the day it was made. A few squirts of switch cleaner
sorted out the dirty contacts on the call switches and the crackly volume
control. What Happened To It?
DUSTY DATAFirst seen: 1962 Original Price: $14.95 Value Today:
£5.00 (0218) Features:
2 transistor amplifier, 2-way (simplex), remote tone call, on/off volume
control, 3.5mm mono jack connection, 36 metre connecting cable Power req. 1 x 9v PP3 battery Dimensions: 100 x 65 x 30mm Weight: 150g (sub 100g) Made (assembled) in: Japan Hen's Teeth (10 rarest) 8 Realistic PRO-62 200 Channel Scanner, 1994
Realistic was one of the house-brands of the US chain Radio Shack, better known in the UK as Tandy, and from the early 1970s until the late 90s this was one of the go-to places to buy advanced and exotic radio equipment, along lots of other interesting and useful electronic gadgets, but more about that later. Obviously the PRO-62 wasn’t designed just for earwigging mobile phone calls; the really important features are that this compact pocket-size receiver can store, and rapidly scan up to 200 stored channels, on frequencies between 35MHz and 960MHz or roughly from the bottom end of the VHF band to the lower third of the UHF band. That represents around 68,000 possible channels, which are the bulk of the frequencies used by government and emergency services, armed forces, and aircraft, not to mention commercial organisations and those first generation mobile phones. Mostly these frequencies are used for short-range two-way communications, and where much of what you might hear is not intended for public consumption. The breadth of the PRO-62’s coverage was, and still is an impressive feat on something so small but whilst it still picks up lots of private transmissions, nowadays you won’t hear much in the way of plain speech. Where security is a concern communications channels tend to be digitally encrypted but the one thing older scanners like this still do really well is let you listen in to air traffic control and aircraft. Commercial and private aviation continues to use a fairly ancient VHF technology, utilising simple AM modulation. It’s not so much a throwback to the past but an illustration of the system’s range, reliability, resilience and worldwide standardisation.
Essentially that is all there is to it, and once programmed the PRO-62 skims through stored channels at the rate of 25 a second, which is pretty fast. It automatically selects AM or FM modulation and if you want some privacy there’s a socket on the top for headphones or an earphone.
I can be fairly precise
about when and where this PRO-62 came into my possession. It was in 1999, in
Croydon South End, South London, where the local Tandy store was closing.
This followed the decision of Radio Shack to shut down its UK operation. Tandy
shops were quickly stripped by bargain hunters and after only a few days there
was almost nothing left except the more expensive and specialised items. The PRO-62
originally sold for around £350 and when I visited the shop, on the last day of
the closeout, it was one of the few things left on the almost bare shelves. It
caught my eye, though I was disappointed to see that it was priced at £100, and well above my paygrade. As
I stood looking at it a sales assistant came over and asked me how much I was
prepared to pay for it? I made what I thought was a cheeky offer of £20, and to
my great surprise, it was instantly accepted. This was the last one, the
display model and it didn’t have a box though the assistant managed to find the
instructions. It seemed to be in near mint condition and although it didn’t
come with any sort of guarantee, it felt like real bargain. I left the shop for the
last time with a mixture of delight and sadness. In truth I wasn’t a
regular customer of Tandy. The stuff they sold seemed to be reasonably good quality
but the prices were well over the top and staff always appeared a bit pushy,
Nevertheless they were one of the last shops selling interesting and
unusual electronic gadgets and components and the UK's High Streets became a much
poorer place without them. This PRO-62 is very well made, still in
excellent condition and in full working order, though the bands are a lot quieter
nowadays. There are plenty of loud beeps and buzzes from digital devices and
unless you connect it to a decent antenna the only intelligible transmissions
you are likely to hear are the comings and goings of aircraft, and only then if
you are relatively close to an airfield or airport or underneath a flight path. What Happened To It? The US chain store Radio Shack
was founded way back, in 1921 and for the following 75 or so years it thrived
and grew with thousands branches and franchises across the US and in a dozen or more countries. At its peak it was the
world’s leading supplier of electronic technologies and personal computers. These
included CB Radio, calculators, organisers, metal detectors, TVs, radios,
telephones, Hi-Fi, VCRs and the list goes on and on, but by the early 90s it
all started to go wrong. Growing competition from rival retailers and the economic
depression ate in to its core home entertainment equipment and PC businesses. It found
it hard to keep up with the rapid changes in personal computing and cellular
phones and the downturn in the US market spread outwards to its international
divisions. The last UK Tandy store closed in 2000 and the brand was taken over
by Carphone Warehouse and Techno. In spite of a couple of attempts to revive
the name it has all but disappeared. Tandy’s demise resulted in some of their offerings becoming quite collectible. Ironically this includes
their cheapest offering, the wonderful free Tandy catalogue. This colourful
tome was released annually, showcasing the latest tech gadgets and becoming
essential reading for techno-nerds of all ages. Every so often vintage Tandy
catalogues from the 70s and 80s turn up on ebay and they can fetch upwards of
£10. PRO-62’s also make the odd appearance but prices are difficult to pin
down. Faulty units, suitable only for spares typically sell for between £20 and
£30, but the only two working examples I have seen recently went for for £50 and
£150. Make of that what you will. The only thing I can say with certainty is
that I’m unlikely to ever see another one for only £20. DUSTY DATAFirst seen: 1994 Original Price: £350.00 Value Today: £50.00 (0118) Features: 200 channel memory in 10 banks, scan
speed up to 50 chans/sec in Hyperscan mode, normal mode 25 chans/sec, frequency
coverage: 35 – 54MHz, 118-136.97MHz, 137 – 174 MHz, 380 – 512MHz, 806 –
823.98MHz, 849.012 – 868.98MHz, 894.01 – 960MHz, auto/manual AM/FM selection,
backlit LCD, keyboard lock, rotary squelch & on/off volume controls,
external ‘rubber duck’ antenna, earphone socket, external DC supply/charge Power req. 6 x 1.5 volt C cells, external 9V DC Dimensions: 150 x 62 x 40mm Weight: 275g Made (assembled) in: China Hen's Teeth (10 rarest) 6 BT CT6000B Moneybox Payphone, 1982
The only problem
with having a landline phone back then was that calls were comparatively
expensive, especially when it involved calling someone a long way away and
unless a close eye was kept on the phone – they were often installed in
hallways, so the ringing didn’t disturb the TV… – it could be tricky to stop others in the household from using
it and running up massive bills.
As a matter of
interest it looks like BT intended the Moneybox to accept 20 pence coins.
There’s a reversible plate behind the coin slot with a 20p sized hole – but it
seems that this was never implemented, probably because the expensive coin
mechanism would have to be replaced or modified.
Whilst it is
sturdily built it remains quite vulnerable, to simple theft – just unplug it
and run, coins and all – to casual vandalism; the case can be prised open with
nothing more sophisticated than a large screwdriver. Aside from the Owner’s key
the only other security measure is a tilt switch, which disables the phone if
any attempt is made to shake out coins inside or dislodge one stuck in the
mechanism. What Happened To
It? The Moneybox
wasn’t BT’s first compact payphone; in the late seventies it developed a range
of relatively small mobile and wall-mounted models for use in hospitals,
offices and so on. However, the CT6000 was almost certainly one of the first
that didn’t look too out of place in a domestic environment. It was followed by
a handful of even smaller and sleeker designs but it looks like BT made the
decision to return to chunkier and more vandal-proof payphones, possibly in
response to growing problems with theft and abuse. The usually
informative vintage telephone websites have relatively little to say about this
instrument so I have taken a stab at 1982 as the most likely date of
manufacture or introduction. This is based on things like the Hitachi
microcontroller it uses and the early digital tone keypad (as opposed to a
rotary dial) but it could easily be 3 or 4 years either way. As always if
anyone can nail it down to a more precise date, please let me know. It is equally difficult to work out the value. My estimation is based entirely on the small handful that have appeared on ebay in the past year (2017), which sold for between £10 and £20, mostly to the first and only bidders. From that I conclude that compact domestic payphones have yet to achieve collectible status but as is so often the case, one day they could become highly sought after so don’t miss out on the opportunity if you ever see one going cheap. If nothing else, with a few simple modifications it can become a novelty combination home phone and moneybox, and probably a quite effective deterrent to anyone thinking of using it to make sneaky phone calls. DUSTY DATA
First seen: 1982 Original
Price: £n/a
(available for rent only) Value Today: £15 (1117) Features: Coil operated, user programmable call
charges, LCD display: time/duration, low battery, cash record, cash box full
(capacity 100 x old 10p/2 shilling coins), selective free calls, tilt warning,
call barring & reception (nos. starting 10 & 010(, reverse charge
warning, coin holders, coin return, security keylock, tone dialling Power
req. 4 x 1.5v AA
cells & line power Dimensions: 245 x 130 x 185 mm Weight: 1.6kg Made (assembled)
in: UK Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 8 Gfeller Eiger Phone, BT
TSR-1009, 1982
There’s no need for
any instructions; picking it up opens the line, dial the number and speak and
listen as you would with any other phone. If you think the ringer volume (a
thin-sounding high-pitched buzz) is too loud, and you would need seriously
sensitive ears for that to happen, you simply flipped the little white switch
set into the microphone or transmitter grille. This isn’t half as clever as it
looks; it just slides a panel over the holes to muffle the sound a bit.
This one came from
ebay. I thought it would go really quickly, they are not that common and
collectors generally snap them up. However, it hung around for several weeks
until I could bear it no longer, so I put it (and me) out of our misery and
coughed up the £20.00 asking price. It was as described and
in very good condition. There are a few small scuff marks here and there, the
fuzzy finish isn’t very resilient, but they hardly notice and overall it looks
very good. It works too, though the lack of a proper digital keypad limits its
usefulness. I suspect that it wouldn’t take much to upgrade. Someone handy with
a screwdriver wouldn’t have much trouble transplanting the guts from a modern
phone, but I’d rather keep this one as the Gods and BT intended, in its
original condition. What Happened To It? The Eiger phone was
made by a Swiss company called Gfeller. They’ve been around for a very long
time, since 1896 to be exact, when Christian Gfeller set up a small factory
making telephones and signal bells for the Swiss railway. Over the next 70 or
so years Gfeller AG grew to become a leading light in the telecomms industry.
In 1977 it developed one of the first one-piece phones, the Electron, which was
the forerunner of the Atlanta, and following some light tweaking, in 1981 it
became the Eiger. In 1984 Gfeller merged with Autofon, another major Swiss
telecomms company, and the Gfeller name quietly disappeared from view.
DUSTY DATA
First seen: 1981 Original Price: £27.00 plus additional £2.00
quarterly rental Value Today: £30 (1017) Features: One piece design, push-button keypad,
last number redial, mute, ringer volume ‘switch’ Power req. n/a (line powered) Dimensions: 225 x 73 x 110mm Weight: 420g Made (assembled)
in: Switzerland Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 8 Amstrad e-m@iler Plus,
2001
It could, and indeed
should have worked, but the timing was unfortunate. Somewhere down the line the
designers lost sight of their target market and Amstrad got greedy. The mix of
features sounded enticing though and the launch price of £90.00 was a good deal
less than a PC. The feature list gets off to a good start with a well specified
home telephone. No arguments there. It has caller display, a built-in digital
answer phone, hands-free operation and a 700-name address book (assuming you
managed to figure out how they all worked). The pivoting two-colour backlit LCD
screen is a good size and easy to read, and there’s a handy pull-out mini
qwerty keyboard stowed under the top panel but that is about as far as the good
bits go. Everything from that point onwards is either hard to use, expensive,
or both.
Amstrad might have got
away with it for a little longer if it hadn’t been so difficult to use. The
designers appear to have assumed that it would be bought by people who were
comfortable learning how to use a complex multi-function device that relied on
a poorly designed user interface and quirky menu-driven on-screen display. User
also had to memorise sometimes lengthy control sequences, and know what do when
it got into error mode – as frequently happened at the hands of a frustrated
owner. And woe betides anyone who tried to use it as a bedroom phone; it had a
very nasty habit of lighting up at night to display adverts.
Its very brief career
means that it has been preserved in almost as-new condition. I’m kicking myself
for not asking my mother to hang on to the box and instructions but even after
years of storage it still powers up and looks in vain for a dial-up telephone
number to connect to. Build quality was pretty good, though fixing a broken one
looks like it could be a nightmare; main processor board is well made but the
rat’s nest of cables and connectors means there’s plenty of potential for hard
to locate loose or intermittent connections. What Happened To It? The e-m@iler was launched in 2000 amid a lot of media hype and a fair amount of goodwill in the press, keen to see it succeed but once the initial excitement died down and its many flaws became apparent it started the slow decline that resulted in it becoming a complete flop. In spite of reported sales of 92,000 units it cost Amstrad a very pretty penny (conservatively estimated at between £10 and £20 million), not to mention the loss of a senior executive and the acquisition of a lot of unhappy customers. Amstrad tried repeatedly to revive interest in the device but it was up against vastly more sophisticated PCs, which by the early noughties were tumbling in price, helped by big improvements in Windows, and rapidly expanding broadband networks, which the e-m@iler was incapable of accessing. Massive discounts didn’t help and towards the end you could pick them up for the ridiculously low price of £9.00 from high street stores like Tesco. The end came in 2010 when the Amserve service was moved to BSKYB and a year later the plug was pulled. The glut of cheap e-m@ailers prompted a lot of hackers and tweakers to seek alternative uses for it. This included installing a cut down version of Linux on the machine’s surprisingly capable ARM-based processor, but there’s little evidence that it was ever a successful or practical re-cycling exercise. Amstrad’s withdrawal of support also meant that it couldn’t even be used as a basic telephone and so it joins the ranks of major tech failures, which bizarrely has resulted in a slow but steady increase in prices on ebay. From the all-time low closeout price of £9 they are now changing hands for upwards of £25, and very occasionally twice that amount for mint, boxed examples. I can’t see it every going much higher than that but scruffy ones can be found for as little as £5.00 online and at car boot sales. With a quick spruce up you could easily double your money and given time – a hundred years, say -- it might even become an iconic, or should that be ironic collectible. DUSTY DATA
First seen: 2000 Original Price: £79.99 Value Today: £30.00 (0817) Features: Telephone with digital
answer phone, hands-free operation, 700-name address book & caller display,
send & receive email, limited web access via Amserve & Amsurf portals,
send SMS text & MMS messages, Smart Card slot,
integral and corded qwerty keyboard, calculator, play Sinclair Spectrum games Power req. 28 volts DC, via
proprietary AV mains adaptor Dimensions: 245 x 182 x 200mm Weight: 1.5g Made (assembled)
in: China Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 4 Bang & Olufsen BeoCom 2000, 1986
Either way there is no denying
it was, and still is very different from your average home phone, and since it
came from B&O the differences are more than skin-deep. It was an in-house
design and unusually, they manufactured everything as well, including the
microphone, earpiece and speaker (for the hands free facility). Apparently this
was a real back to the drawing board exercise in an attempt to get the best
possible sound quality from what is basically a very low quality medium.
Then there’s the handset.
Somewhere down the line there seems to have been strict instructions on the
design brief to avoid curves. A couple, like the rounded buttons on the keypad,
seem to have slipped through. The only other one is on the inside edge of the
handset. It’s out of sight most of the time and I suspect that it was only
allowed under duress, as a completely flat handset would have been an ergonomic
nightmare. In spite of my best
haggling efforts the stallholder at the Kent car boot sale where I found this
one stuck rigidly to his £5.00 asking price. Whilst at first glance it seemed
to be in a pretty dismal condition, in retrospect it was a reasonable price for
such a rare and unusual model. Aside from the missing panel covering the
notepad the only real problem was that a previous owner was arguably one of the
world’s worst painters. The top was splattered with hundreds of spots of white
paint. Luckily it was some sort of emulsion and most came away easily with a
gentle poke from a wooden stirring stick, leaving no marks. The more stubborn
ones responded well to light rubbing with isopropyl alcohol. Even so that was a
couple of hours of my life I’ll never get back. Underneath the surfaces were in
very good shape and with some more cleaning and half a can of plastic polish
spray, it looks almost like new. It’s in good working order too, though I’ll
just have to take it on trust that the B&O magic used on the audio components
was worth all the effort and expense. Suffice it to say it sounds okay. What Happened To It? After graduating Danish
engineering student Peter Bang teamed up with his friend Svend Olufsen to
dabble and experiment with audio equipment in the attic of Olufsen’s home. That
was in 1925; a year later they went into business together developing sound
recording systems for the movie industry and PA speakers for the military and,
bizarrely, circuses… Radios followed but B&O, as we know them today, didn’t
start making their icon and expensive high-end audio equipment, radios and TVs
until the late 1950s and this was largely thanks to the influence of designer
Ib Fabiansen, who joined the company in 1957.
There has always been a steady demand for B&O products, especially vintage ones, and even a humble phone like this one can fetch £100 or more on ebay. However, condition is everything to a determined collector, which is why my BeoCom 2000, with its missing panel cover, probably wouldn’t sell for more than £30 to £40. It may not sound like much of an investment but should I ever decide to sell it I can be pretty sure I’ll get my fiver back. DUSTY DATA
First seen: 1986? Original Price: £100.00 Value Today: £45.00 (0717) Features LCD display (number called, call duration),
20-number memory, ‘emergency’ key single number memory, last 3-number redial,
microphone mute, pause (call hold), tone ringer (8-levels), volume control,
tone/pulse dialling, speakerphone/handsfree facility, integral notepad Power req. Phone: line-powered, memory backup 1 x 3.6
volt lithium cell Dimensions: 210 x 222 x 80mm Weight: 950g Made (assembled) in: Denmark Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 8 GE Help 3-5908 Emergency AM CB Radio, 1983
What Happened To It? To be fair to the small bands of die-hard CBers on both sides of the big pond, it has never really gone away. However, the fact remains that it is an obsolete technology. Nowadays virtually everyone has a mobile phone, and they’re usually a much better bet if you need to summon help in an emergency, or simply chat with someone, but there are still a few things CB does better than anything else. It’s an open communication system, which means anyone within range can overhear or participate in a conversation. That works both ways and here in the UK at least idiots often plagued the bands with inane chatter, but on a good day it created a kind of community spirit, which really isn’t the same thing as web-based social media. It’s also free to use, once you’ve paid out for the equipment, and it excels at local short range, point to point communications. This can be handy for things like crowd control and event organisation, vehicle to vehicle comms and so on, though it has to be said that the modern versions of license-free ‘CB’, operating on VHF and UHF frequencies, work a lot better than the hissy old AM short wave system. Even though they are illegal in the UK vintage AM CB transceivers in good working order will always find a buyer. There’s also a modest collector’s market for iconic or highly featured ‘rigs’ from manufacturers like Cobra, Midland, President and Uniden. The GE Help isn’t in that league, at least not yet. Emergency outfits like this one are a largely forgotten backwater of the CB story and there is very little information about them on the web. GE Helps turn up every so often on the US ebay site and typically sell for under $25.00 but one thing is for sure, only a small handful of them would have reached the UK. For that reason this one is a little bit special and on a good day, with the wind in the right direction, it might be worth between £20 and £50 to the right person. DUSTY DATA (Manual)First seen: 1983 Original Price: $50? Value Today: £20
(0217) Features: 40 channel AM CB Transceiver (26.965 – 27.405MHz), 4 watts RF output, LED channel indicator, rotary volume & channel selector controls, squelch (Local – Distant) slider control, external telescopic ground plane antenna with magnetic base, power lead with cigar lighter plug, carry case Power req. 12-volts DC Dimensions: 195 x 80 x 52mm Weight: 1.35g Made (assembled) in: Hong
Kong Hen's Teeth (10 rarest) 8 Homer KIT-505 Telephone Amplifier, 1968
The date is the day it was sold, and that was Monday
the 11th of November 1968. It cost three pounds two shillings, and it was bought from
West London Direct Supplies located at 169 Kensington High Street in London W8. The item in question is a Homer Model KIT-505
Transistor Telephone Amplifier, and the reason there is so much detailed
information is because it came in its original box, along with a sales receipt,
instruction leaflet and a copy of West London Direct Supplies’ catalogue from
September 1968. It all makes fascinating reading and you can see them in the
Manuals Archive. Best of all, it looks like the box hasn’t been opened since
the day it was sold. A telephone amplifier, in case you haven’t come
across one before, is pretty much what you would expect. It’s a small box,
containing a battery powered amplifier and it connects to a telephone, so you
can hear what the other person on the line is saying without having to clamp
the handset to your ear. In other words it’s for hands-free operation, though
back in the dim-distant, when these things were popular, landline telephone
earpieces were a lot quieter than they are now. The emphasis then was on it
being used for crackly long distance or ‘trunk’ calls and as an aid for the
hard of hearing. It is really easy to use, and there’s no need to mess
around with wires and connectors, not that they were allowed in those days. The
GPO, later to become BT, was fanatical about what could be connected to their network and as far as most residential subscribers were concerned it
meant virtually nothing was allowed. Devices like this telephone amplifier got
around that inconvenience using a clever device called an induction coil. This
attaches to the side of the phone or the handset with a suction cup and it
picks up electromagnetic emanations from coils inside the phone. The tiny
signals are then fed into an amplifier and heard through the built-in speaker.
This used to work well on the telephones of the day but as time went by phones
used fewer coils and on many modern phones induction coil pickups hardly work
at all. On this one it is still possible to get a faint response from some
models, and there’s sometimes a sweet spot on the handset, close to the
earpiece.
This one was a fairly recent (late 2016) ebay find. I
was the only bidder and it never got above the starting price of £2.50. It
might have attracted more attention if the description had made more of the
fact that it was virtually as-new, in near pristine condition and had probably
never been used. What Happened To It? Don’t read too much into the Homer badge on the
speaker panel. It was one of hundreds of western-sounding names used by small,
obscure (and often unpronounceable) Japanese companies churning out gadgets
like this. The vast majority of them have since vanished without trace. In fact
this model was almost certainly sold under a dozens of different names,
including ones chosen by importers and retailers like West London Direct
Supplies. As you’ll see from the company’s catalogue in the Manuals Archive the
plastic case really earns its keep and turns up in other guises, in intercoms
and baby alarms, and probably a few other things besides. Telephone amplifiers, on the other hand haven’t gone
away, even though hands-free operation has become a common feature on home and
office phones. However, most modern telephone amplifiers work differently to
this one. Instead of a pickup coil they attach to the handset and use a small
microphone to pick up the sounds coming from the earpiece. There is no question that this one was an absolute
bargain but that is mainly due to it’s immaculate condition and provenance, but
even used examples of similar vintage and in a good state of repair fail to generate
much excitement amongst phone collectors and fans of retro technology. Even
though they don’t come up very often on ebay prices are still quite low and
they generally sell for between £5 and £20. There are exceptions though, and
devices made in the 40s and 50s are rarer and more ornate, with prices to
match. If you wait long enough small sixties telephone amps like this will
creep up in value so now is a good time to invest, and you can afford to be
choosy and target the best examples. DUSTY DATA
First seen 1968 Original Price £3
2s (£2.10) Value Today £10 (1216)
Features 3-transistor amplifier, 70mm speaker, induction coil
pickup coil with suction cup, rotary volume, on/off switch, 2.5mm jack (for
pickup coil). Power req. 9-volt PP3 Dimensions: 103 x 73 x 43mm Weight: 250g Made (assembled) in: Japan Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 7 Betacom CP/6 Ferrari Phone, 1986
Thanks to the miracle of eighties technology this
scale model of the Testarossa is much more useable, and a whole lot cheaper than a gas guzzling
supercar. Just stick your fingers through the windows, lift up the roof and hey
presto; you have an elegant, retro-styled push-button phone. Okay, that’s not
much consolation but if you believe the descriptions of some of the Betacom
CP/6s on ebay, it’s a highly sought-after collectible, especially amongst
Ferrari owners and enthusiasts, so who knows? One day a CP/6 could be worth as
much as the real thing…
On the plus side this one was really cheap, just 50
pence at a local car boot sale. All it needed to get it into showroom condition
was a quick strip down to remove the dust and hairs that made it into the case
and handset, followed by a wipe over with some plastic cleaner and polish. In
common with most phones from that era -- compliant with BT regulations -- it
was quite well made so it wasn’t too much of a surprise to find that it was
still in good working order. What Happened To It? Betacom set up shop in the mid 60s and were a
prolific importer of budget priced audio and video products, and novelty
phones. In the early 90s Amstrad took a controlling interest in the company,
giving it a slice of the UK's growing telecomms market. The association didn’t
last very long though and by the late 90s Betacom had been sold off to the Alba
Group, later to become Harvard International, at which point the Betacom brand
seems to have sunk without trace. Novelty telephones designed to look like sports cars,
and just about anything else you can think of, are still with us but hard-wired
landline phones are rapidly becoming an endangered species, now that just about
everyone on the planet has at least one mobile phone. This is good and bad news
for collectors of vintage technology. Phones like this one are cheap and
plentiful and now would be a good time to start a collection, and do your bit
to save this often overlooked branch of late twentieth century technology from
extinction. The bad news is that most phones from the 70s onwards are unlikely
to gain much in value, at least not in the short term. There are a few
exceptions and the Betacom CP/6 could be a borderline case. The perceived
cachet associated with the Ferrari name means that prices on ebay are often
some way above what they are really worth. Mint and boxed examples will always
sell for a bit more than a well used one, but in the end their actual value is
no more, and no less that someone is prepared to pay, which can be anywhere
between 50p and £50. DUSTY DATA
First seen 1986 Original Price £20 Value Today £5
(1116) Features Numeric keypad (pulse dialling only), mute & last
number redial functions, ringer on/off Power req. n/a (line powered) Dimensions: 230 x 115 x 60mm Weight: 600g Made (assembled) in: Hong
Kong Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 6 BT Telephone 282A, Linesman’s Test
Phone, 1984
comms.
Once upon a time, way back, in 1984, this bright yellow BT 282A was part of
that secret world and at the cutting edge of the wizardry. It was one of the
first generation of test phones to have a fully featured numeric keypad and
this made it suitable for use with digital exchanges, which at the time were
being rolled out across the UK. It is possible that this model was developed
quite rapidly as it is housed in what appears to be a near identical handset
moulding to its immediate predecessor, the plain vanilla BT 282. This had a
miniature rotary dial where the keypad on the 282A sits.
There is a large belt hook at the
top and it is one of the possible explanations why instruments like this are
known in the trade as ‘Butt’ (or ‘Buttinski’, mostly in the US) phones. One
theory is that when not in use the phone can be hung from the linesman’s tool
or ‘Butt Belt’. The alternative is that it allows engineers to ‘butt’ into conversations;
take your pick…
The quality of construction is up
to BT’s usual very high standards. This is just as well as these phones tend to
suffer from a good deal of abuse and rough handling and no doubt an occasional
accidental tumble from the top of a telephone pole. This one, though, seems to
have led a fairly sedate life with just a few light scratches here and there.
Somehow the case also managed to escape being branded with ‘Property of BT’ or
personalised, with the engineer’s name. This can be a fairly brutal process,
accomplished with the aid of a hot soldering iron or sharp instrument. It’s a
very old tradition, supposed to stop expensive test instruments going
walkabout, and if they do, help to identify and reunite them with their
original owners. It was found at large Sunday car
boot sale in Dorset, along with a few other exotic test instruments and tools,
rarely seen in the wild. The seller revealed that she was an embittered ex wife
of a BT engineer and having ‘a bit of a clearout’. It was a popular stall… This
282A set me back just £2.00, and I wasn’t about to argue, not least because it
was a good deal for one in such good condition, and due to its age BT probably
wouldn’t want it back. The stallholder’s other telecomms items were similarly
priced but they were mostly in a poor state and far too specialised, even for
me. Essentially all it needed was a quick wipe over and it was good to go. It’s
fully functional and if it fits in with your décor it could, at a pinch, even
be used as a normal house phone, though the ‘ringer’ is so quiet as to be next
to useless but the two LEDs above the keypad flash brightly when there’s an
incoming call. What Happened To It? It was made in the UK by A P
Besson Ltd, a company formed in the late 50s, initially to make parts
for hearing aids but it quickly diversified into other areas including handset
manufacture, PCB assembly and injection moulding for the likes of the GPO and
later BT. In 1990 it was taken over by the Japanese Hosiden Corporation and
continues to this day supplying parts and components to the telecommunications
industry. The 282A appears to have been in
production for around 5 years, before being replaced by the more sophisticated
284 models. Prior to the changeover to digital exchanges linesman’s phones
could remain in use, virtually unchanged, sometimes for several decades but the
demands of the new technology meant that older and simpler models could become
obsolete in just a few years. Current models have many more functions and
facilities suited to digital operation, nevertheless vintage instruments like
the 282A can still be used to diagnose basic line faults, and provided it’s
connected to a home network with at least one other phone with an audible
ringer there’s no reason why it can’t continue to earn its keep. They’re not
expensive either and good examples can often be found on ebay for between £10
and £20. Prices probably won’t increase by much in the short term, though.
There is relatively little interest outside of the phone collecting community
and this one is a little too recent to generate much excitement, but give it
time… DUSTY DATA
First seen 1984 Original Price £n/a Value Today £10.00
(1016) Features Tone dial, numeric keypad (with star and hash keys), manual
on/off hook switching, LED indicators (red: connected, green: off hook,
together ringing), butt belt hook, BT connector Power req. n/a (line powered) Dimensions: 267 x 90 x 70mm Weight: 400g Made (assembled) in: Bristol,
UK Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 6 R2D2 Phone Lazerbuilt Model 805,
1995
It’s an original 1995 vintage
model – more about that later – and surprisingly big too, measuring 285mm (over
11 inches) from the base of its articulated locomotive units (legs) to the top
of its rotating head dome. The handset is cleverly disguised as part of R2D2’s
left leg, and when someone calls the dome lights up and starts moving back and
forth whilst emitting a stream of those familiar beeps and chirps. This feature
can be turned off if required. There’s also a button on the front, marked Demo,
which makes it go through its routine; it is just as well there’s an off switch,
as it can get quite annoying after a while. It probably reduces the battery
life too, from a year or more to just a few weeks, especially when there are
kid (of all ages…) in the house. For such an advanced robotic contrivance the
phone part is disappointingly basic; no transwarp Wi-Fi or X-Wing Bluetooth
connectivity, just an ancient touch-tone keypad with a last number redial
button, but back in this Galaxy, a long, long time ago -- the late twentieth
century -- that was all you needed..
What Happened To It? Collecting Star Wars paraphernalia
can be a risky business. Detail and provenance is everything. It pays to do
some homework before parting with serious money on allegedly ‘rare’ or
expensive items in the hope of one day getting a return on your investment. Take
this phone, for example. It was made in 1995 and marketed in the UK by a
company called Lazerbuilt. It was a good quality item, aimed at collectors and
closely based on the iconic robotic character from the first 1977 film. Back
then it was a fairly pricey item, even for a novelty phone. It arrived more
than 10 years after the last movie had been released (Return of the Jedi in
1983) so interest in the movies may have been at a low ebb. From the evidence
of the serial numbers on this one and others I have seen it doesn’t look like
many of them were made. However, in 2005, in the wake of the dreadful trilogy
of prequels, released between 1999 and 2005, there was a big revival of
interest in all things Star Wars and the company that originally made this R2D2
dug out their old moulds and dusted them off for another much larger production
run. That means that one way or another
quite a few R2D2 phones have been produced over the years but a lot of those
that are still around today are probably not that old, which must be a consideration
when it comes to value. I have seen several listed on ebay and other websites,
which could easily be the later version, with incredibly optimistic price tags
of several hundred pounds. Even though this one is a genuine ‘first’ generation
model there’s no way it is worth anything like that; more realistically priced
examples can certainly be found and £30 to £50 for a clean, working, Mk 1
version isn’t out of the question. Phones of all types and vintages continue to be popular collectables and more recent ones can be put to good use, providing they still work and have minimal touch-tone facilities. Throw in the Star Wars connection and the obvious quality of this model and you can’t go far wrong, but as always age, condition and price are everything. A good R2D2 phone will always tickle the fancy of Star Wars collectors and the good news is that there are bargains out there to be found, if you trust in the Force. DUSTY DATA
First seen 1995 Original Price £50 Value Today £45
(0916) Features Feature phone with moving, illuminated head, R2D2 sound
effects, switchable ringer, demo mode Power req. 2 x 1.5 volt ‘D’ cells Dimensions: 285 x 222 x 180mm Weight: 1.2kg Made (assembled) in: China Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 8 BT Rhapsody SR 1012A/8012 Leather Phone, 1982
To be fair it wasn’t BT who dreamt
it up, that honour goes to a Belgian company called Atea, though what was to
become the BT Rhapsody SR 1012A (or TSR 0812) that you see here was based on a
phone called the Unifoon, designed by Dutch Telecom and launched Holland in the
late 70s, initially with a rotary dial. Incidentally, the SR and TSR prefix on
a lot of interesting and oddball GPO and BT phones issued from the early
sixties to the late nineties, stands for Special Range/Telephone Special Range
and the differences in the model number denote whether or not it was fitted
with the now standard BT plug. Just thought you’d like to know…
By the way, the keypad uses the old ‘pulse’
dialling system; in other words it simulates the action of a mechanical rotary
dial. At the time UK exchanges were being converted to digital operation and
DTMF or ‘tone’ dialling hadn’t been fully implemented. Consequently on this
phone there are no Hash or Star keys but there are two extra buttons marked
‘S’, for secrecy (mutes the microphone) and ‘R’ or last number redial.
Finally we come to that leather covering. On the plus
side it’s a really neat job and the quality of the material and stitching are
both excellent, but that still leaves open the question of who would want such
a thing? Leather wasn’t especially trendy in the early eighties and the other
colours in BT’s Rhapsody range (blue, grey & ivory) were much more in
keeping with the styles of the time. Leather is a tough material but it has its
drawbacks. It needs looking after, regular cleaning and can deteriorate if
left in bright sunlight or kept in a dry atmosphere. It wasn’t a cheap option
either. In the early eighties the vast majority of BT customers were still
renting their phones; you couldn’t officially buy a Rhapsody phone so the only
way to get one would be pay BT £25 for installation and shell out an extra £2.50 over
and above the normal quarterly rental fee. I struck lucky with this one, found at a large
open-air antiques fair in Surrey. It was in amongst a lot of expensive Art Deco
ceramics. I call this the fish out of water scenario and it can often help with the
price. And so it was; the stallholder had no real interest in the phone and was
happy to accept an offer of £5.00 for it. It looked as though it had been in storage for quite
a while – the novelty had probably worn off quite quickly -- and underneath a
few light layers of dirt it appeared to have been little used and in really
good condition. It worked too and apart from the limitations of the vintage
keypad, it performs as well as any modern phone. What Happened To It? The early 1980s were a very busy time for BT. It is
unclear when the Rhapsody model was withdrawn but it probably didn’t hang about
much beyond 1985 as by then BT had been fully privatised and the changeover to
a digital network was nearing completion. All of this resulted in a growing
demand for more compact, sophisticated and novel phones. The choice and design
of standard residential phones had also improved in leaps and bounds, and a
growing number of BT consumers were opting to buy their own phones, rather than
renting from BT. No doubt the Rhapsody’s innards could have been updated but
the styling was starting to look dated, it’s time had passed and not even the
fancy leather covering could save it. I doubt that more than a few thousand leather
Rhapsody phones were issued and the majority of those would have been returned
to BT for disposal as and when they were replaced. Technically they were still
BTs property, so any that escaped into the wild and have survived until now are
few and far between. They do come up ebay every so often and prices are
generally in the range £30 to £50, which isn’t a lot for such a rare and
idiosyncratic design. If you can do without the leather trim then standard
Rhapsody phones generally go for well under £20, but the lowish prices probably
reflect the fact that the numeric keypad limits its functionality in today’s
digital universe. DUSTY DATA
First seen 1982 Original Price £25.00
installation plus additional £2.50 quarterly line rental) Value Today £30
(0816) Features Push-button digital keypad, bell ringer with mute, ‘S’
secrecy (microphone mute) button, redial last number, table top or wall
mounting, integral carry handle Power req. n/a (line powered) Dimensions: 237 x 162 x 85mm Weight: 1.5kg Made (assembled) in: Belgium Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 6 Pye TMC 1705 Linesman’s Telephone, 1970
Now this is where it gets a bit complicated, and a
tad pedantic because the instrument you see here is actually a Pye TMC 1705.
This is the military version of the one used by GPO and BT engineers, which has
the designation 704A, or Linesman’s Phone B. However, apart from the badge on
the top of the case and one or two minor technical differences they are
practically identical. This model, one of a very long line of portable test
telephones, was first issued in 1968 and was apparently still in service 20
years later. At around that time telephone exchanges across the country were
being converted to digital operation and most domestic phones were starting to
appear with numeric keypads, rather than dials, so these old warhorses had to
be replaced by more sophisticated test instruments. Basically it is very simple, it’s a portable
telephone designed for use in the field, up a pole or indeed anywhere there was
a fault, or suspected fault. It has all of the features of a regular phone,
namely a handset, rotary dial and an internal ringer or buzzer, but there the
similarity ends. The most obvious difference is the size, and that’s due in
part to the rugged carry case, which clearly suited its role in military
service. Unlike a normal phone, though, it has a pair of terminals, for a temporary
connection to a phone line, and there are extra sockets for a headset, and a
‘Tone Amplifier’. This is an add-on that helps an engineer to identify pairs of
cables, and if you’ve ever seen the rat’s nest of wires inside one of those
kerbside junction boxes you’ll understand how useful this can be. There’s another novel feature on the handset
earpiece, and it is one of the few differences between the 1705 and 704 models;
it’s a small white button connected to the microphone or transmitter. On the
civilian 704 the button can be latched in the cut-off position, on the 1705 it
operates as a PTT (push-to-talk) switch. The requirements for such a switch are
many and various, from carrying out certain types of test, to being able to
silently monitor calls.
Pye and TMC go way back, to 1896 in the case of the
company formed by one William George Pye. TMC or The Telephone Manufacturing
Company of Britain was formed in 1920, and until the 1960s they were separate,
but often overlapping suppliers of telecommunications equipment to the GPO then
BT and The Ministry of Defence. Pye eventually bought out TMC and in 1976 they
were swallowed up by the (then) mighty Dutch Philips Group, where eventually
the two once distinctive brands quietly faded away. As a matter of interest
this 1705 has the code TMA stamped on the inside of the lid; the interweb
suggests that this indicates it was made in TMC’s Airdrie factory, which was
sold off by Philips in the mid 1990s. What Happened To It? I suspect that Linesman’s test phones have been around since a day or two after the telephone was invented, which was probably when the first fault was
reported. Most of the 704/1705’s predecessors are immediately recognisable as
test instruments, though not all of them are so bulky. Some like the famous
Telephone 280 or ‘Buttinski’ are almost pocket size. The big difference in the
704/1705’s immediate successors, which started to appear in the mid to late
seventies following the changeover to digital exchanges, was the addition of a
digital keypad and extra features designed to speed up fault finding. For purists the disappearance of the rotary dial has meant that linesman’s phone have lost a lot of their appeal so by rights the 704/1705 should be a sought after collectable, except that they
were made in vast numbers. There are usually plenty of clean and keenly priced
ones on ebay, with prices starting at well under £20. They’re also no stranger
to car boot sales and if anyone tries to sell you one for more than £10, tell
them what they can do with it. Don’t be put off though; no collection of
vintage phones is complete without at least one of them. They make an
interesting addition to any occasional table or hallstand and a guaranteed
conversation starter at parties. What’s more, if you’re handy with a
screwdriver, you could cobble together a simple intercom with another old
phone, so you can call the wife or kids from the garage or shed where you have
been sent, to indulge in your strange hobby…
DUSTY DATA
First seen 1970 Original Price £?
(a lot…) Value Today £10
(0716) Features 2-wire connection, two transistor internal buzzer/ringer.
LB/CB (local/central battery) operation, rotary dial, transmitter cut-off
switch (on handset), external headset socket, tone amplifier sockets Power req. 3 x 1.5v D cells Dimensions: 300
x 145 x 155mm Weight: 2.8kg Made (assembled) in: Airdrie
Scotland Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 5 Direct Line Phones -- Geemarc & Matchbox ,
1993-5
The iconic bright red wheelie phone first appeared in
Direct Line’s 1990 TV ad campaign for car insurance and the clever design and
annoyingly memorable ‘Cavalry Charge’ jingle were an instant success and have
been a fixture ever since. It’s hard to say exactly how, when or why the phone made
the transition from an animated film prop to an actual working product but it probably happened at around 1992/3, due to public demand, or through the
efforts of an astute marketing wallah. Although both items went on sale it
looks like a lot of them were given away, to Direct Line employees and
customers. They were made in China by serial novelty phone manufacturer
Geemarc and almost certainly based on an existing copy of the classic Type 746
phone, which the company was also making. The actual phone was supplied to GPO/BT
subscribers from the late sixties onwards, though to be precise, push-button variants
like the Direct Line phone didn’t appear until the early 1980s. The only
significant difference to the real thing is the addition of the four wheels;
incidentally, they don’t turn, presumably to stop the phone rolling off tables
and stands.
Matchbox has also done a great job copying the
design, and -- nerdy-geek trivia alert -- they’ve gone one step further in the cause
of authenticity by omitting the hash and star keys from the keyboard. These
were not fitted to the phones featured in the early adverts – you can see them
on YouTube, should you be so inclined. There’s a couple of
surprises too; it’s is unexpectedly heavy and that is due to the circuit board
and piezo sounder both being attached to a 30 x 35mm slab of mild steel. There
doesn’t seem to be any particularly good reason for this, after all stability
isn’t a great concern on a small plastic toy, but clearly someone somewhere
thought it necessary. The other oddity is how horrible it sounds. It takes
several goes before you make out the jingle. Initially I though it was due to a
duff, or cheap and nasty sounder, but swapping it for a newer, higher quality
item made no difference to the harsh, grating noise it makes. It seems to be
simply a case of crappy design; cheap tune-playing birthday cards sound a hundred
times better than this and as an advert for Direct Line it does them no favours
whatsoever. The first of my two Direct Line phones came from a
car boot sale many years ago, it cost £1.00, which seemed like a real bargain
at the time as I was looking for a fun phone for my then pre-teen son's bedroom. It turned out
to be just an empty shell, at some point someone had ripped out the circuit board
and it was next to useless for anything, even as a toy since the wheels didn't work. I really should have spotted it by the weight and missing
switches. The second one is a more recent off the cuff acquisition. I came across it by chance on ebay and
this time I made sure it was listed as complete and working. I was the only
bidder and I snagged it for the opening bid of £5.99. The toy Direct Line phone
also came from a boot sale; it wasn’t something I was consciously looking for
but having spotted it, curiosity got the better of me and I had to ask the
price. Since the stallholder was only asking 10 pence, it seemed rude not
to buy it. The two working phones were both in great condition and only needed
a clean up to be looking almost as good as new; after installing a set of button cells the toy phone was making its terrible noises once again, probably
for the first time in many years. What Happened To Them? Production of the full size Direct Line phone appears
to have stopped about 10 years ago. A goodly number of them must have been made
and there’s usually half dozen or more on ebay at any one time. Prices vary
enormously, from the occasional sub-£10 bargains and fixer-uppers to £50 plus for
pristine boxed examples. It’s late twentieth century retro tech kitch at its best (or worst…)
with the added interest of the advertising and marketing links, plus it’s
fully useable. It is well on the way to becoming a collectable too and there’s a
noticeable upward trend in prices so grab one while you can. As for the smaller
version, they are no longer being made and it too is the sort of thing can
appeal to collectors of promotional ephemera, and possibly to fans of Matchbox
products as well. Prices for boxed ones are currently between £5 and £10 and
there’s every reason to suppose they will increase so if you spot one for
substantially less than that do not hesitate to give it a good home. DUSTY DATA
First seen 1993 (phone), 1995 (toy) Original Price £25.00
(phone) £5.00 (toy) Value Today £10.00
(phone) & £5.00 (toy) (0516) Features Phone: numeric keypad, redial and last number recall, mechanical bell ringer (variable volume), ringer mute, fixed wheels. Toy:
Direct Line ‘Cavalry Charge’ jingle, detachable handset, rotating wheels Power req. Phone: line powered; Toy: 3 x LR41 button cells Dimensions: Phone:
220 x 210 x 140mm Toy: 65 x 60 x 35mm Weight: 1kg
& 294g Made (assembled) in: China
(phone) & UK (toy) Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 6 & 6 Penguin Phone PG-600, 1983?
I found this one at one of my favourite haunts, one
of the regular open-air antique fairs held at the South of England showground
in Ardingly. It was in a box of household clearance items, priced at £1. This
was the only thing worth having – trust me… -- and as you can see it is in very
good condition and only needed a quick spring clean to have it looking like
new. What Happened To It? Novelty telephones have been with us, almost since
the day after Graham Bell/Elisha Gray/Thomas Edison (depending which expert you
believe) hung up on that first historic phone call in the mid 1870s. However,
in the UK at least, the market for, shall we say ‘distinct’ phones began
unofficially in the late 1970s and really took off in the early 80s following
the privatisation of British Telecom. Up until then private subscribers were
generally compelled to rent telephones from the GPO but there were plenty of
unauthorised and sometimes quite dodgy phones being sold that could be connected to a phone line
using the then, newly introduced, BT 6312 socket (the one we still use). In the early days of privatisation it was possible to
buy a few selected phones, tested and approved by BT,
though it is extremely unlikely that this was one of them.
It does have US FCC conformity marks, but that was never a guarantee (on cheap Far Eastern phones)
that it actually met any technical standards. It is
possible that it was never sold in the UK, and may even have been a souvenir
from a US holiday, either way, it seems clear that there isn't very many of them
around. In the normal course of events that should make it quite
collectable but in this case scarcity doesn’t help the value. I suspect that even on a good
day it might only fetch between £5 and £10 on ebay so it’s going back into the
loft for future generations to admire, and hopefully a time when late twentieth
century novelty telephonic apparatus receives the appreciation it
so richly deserves… DUSTY DATA
First seen 1983? Original Price £10? Value Today £5
(0416) Features Folding cover, alphanumeric keyboard, ringer/mute, last number
redial, silent LED call alert, base-mounted line switch Power req. n/a
(line powered) Dimensions: 150
x 80 x 75mm Weight: 225g Made (assembled) in: Taiwan Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 7 Compact Marine SX-25 VHF Transceiver, 1996
Marine radios like this one, widely installed on smaller
vessels and leisure craft, are mainly used for navigational purposes but
more importantly they can summon help or respond to distress
calls. At the very least, by taking it out of circulation it will prevent
idiots from using it to annoy boaty types around marinas and moorings; at worst
some tosspot could trigger a false alarm, scramble the emergency services and
potentially put lives at risk. As a matter of interest marine radio is one of the
oldest branches of the technology and some of Marconi’s earliest
demonstrations, in the late 1890s, involved sending and receiving wireless
signals over water and to and from ships at sea. Radio also played a vital role
in the rescue of survivors of the ill-fated Titanic in 1912, and has saved
countless lives since then, so it’s a pretty serious business.
Accessing the other 87 channels is equally
straightforward and the SX-25 makes it really easy with a Scan facility. This
steps through the channels one at a time and by carefully adjusting the Squelch
control it stops scanning as soon as it picks up a transmission. Otherwise
channels can be selected by tapping in the number on the keypad, or by manually stepping
up or down the frequency band using two buttons. The channel in use and
operating mode are shown on a small backlit LCD. A press-to-talk (PTT) switch
on the side of the microphone puts the radio into transmit mode and there’s the
option of high or low RF power output (1 or 25 watts), depending on how close,
or distant, the other station happens to be. Around the back there are three sockets, one for a
12-volt DC supply, an SO239 socket for the antenna, and a minijack for an
extension speaker. In short it’s really easy to use and in that respect little more
than a posh CB radio. Well, maybe that’s a bit unfair; in terms of build
quality it is in a very different league, with particular attention paid to
waterproofing, ruggedness and protection against harsh treatment, from both
users and the elements. This also means they’re not cheap and in the mid-ish
1990s, when this model first appeared, it sold for the thick end of £500. From the outside it appeared to be in very good
condition though it was hard to tell if it was working as it’s difficult to
test this sort of thing in the middle of a field, miles from the sea, not to
mention the fact that it would be illegal without a Marine Radio Licence (they
are actually relatively easy to obtain and involve filling out a form and
sending the authorities £20…). I was expecting the seller to be asking
somewhere north of £50 for it so I only asked the price out of mild curiosity.
I was surprised when he said £5.00, which suggested that it was probably a complete
wreck, but I offered him £4.00, which I reckoned the microphone and any
salvageable parts might be worth, and he accepted without any hesitation. I fully expected a nasty mess inside the case but it
looked as though it had never been opened with no signs of corrosion or popped
components. It was hooked up to a bench power supply, initially without an antenna
-- in case it decided to boot up in transmit mode – and it came on without a
hitch or worrying smells and a reassuring hiss from the speaker. This
probably meant that the receiver section, at least was working so after
checking out the various channel selection and function buttons I coupled it up
to a marine mag-mount antenna and a quick scan through the channels bought up
some faint and probably distant signs of life. I didn’t try the transmit functions but I
have little doubt that it also work; this will have to wait until the next
time I buy a boat, and win the Lottery, to pay for it… What Happened To It? The basics of marine radio have changed little since
the Second World War, when the use of the VHF frequency band was first
introduced. On the other hand the equipment has changed out of all recognition,
mirroring developments in valve, transistor and microchip technology over the
years, which have all resulted in smaller, more sophisticated and increasingly
reliable hardware. The majority of ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore
communications are still by voice but many marine radios made within the last
decade or so now have an additional feature called DSC or Digital Selective Calling.
This is a single-button distress call function that sends a signal detailing
the vessel and radio operator’s unique identity code or call sign known as the
MMSI or Maritime Mobile Service Identity number. If the radio is coupled to a
GPS receiver, it can also send positional data. This instantly provides rescue
services with detailed information about the boat – where it is, the name,
size, passenger capacity and so on – which might otherwise be hard to convey
in a force 10 gale over a noisy audio channel. Very little appears to have been written about
Compact Marine or the SX-25 and the few references I found concerned a couple of units for sale on ebay, several appeals for an
instruction manual and a one-line mention in 1997 boating magazine in a price list of VHF marine radios. In other words the only things I know for certain is that it was
made in the mid to late 1990s in Japan (there is a stamp on the case). No other models have come to light, so it
is likely that the manufacturer or distributor, Compact Marine or possibly
Shore-Line (the name on the microphone) is no longer with us. Any additional
information is, as usual, very welcome. As for value, the pair I saw on ebay
sold for £10 (non working) and £45 (working). The market for marine
radios is quite small, and I presume that most boat owners prefer to trust their
safety to a new and modern radio, rather than take chances with a second
hand unit. It’s not old enough to be collectible, nor, as far as I can see, is it especially unusual,
but in my opinion it is the sort of thing that’s worth hanging on to, just in
case. With sea levels rising and the ever-present threats of zombie and alien
attack, taking to the water might be the only way to survive. The point is you are
going to need a way to know when it’s safe to go ashore – assuming there’s anyone
left alive to take your call… DUSTY DATA
First seen 1996 Original Price £500.00 Value Today £25.00
(0416) Features 88 channel VHF marine band transceiver 156.6 –
162.925MHz), Hi/Lo power output (1 or 25 watts RF), channel scan, Channel 16
priority key, rotary volume & squelch controls, channel selection &
secondary function keypad, LCD channel & mode display, dual watch (Ch 16
& user-set), speaker mute, display dim, PTT microphone, SO239 antenna out,
built-in speaker, external speaker minijack
Power req. external
12 volts DC Dimensions: 170
x 153 x 52mm Weight: 1.2kg Made (assembled) in: Japan Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 7 Eagle TI.206 2 Station Intercom, 1968
The Eagle T1.206 appears to be a slightly later version of the TI-206 which also appears on this site, but apart from the obvious cosmetic differences, shorter cable and substitustion of a full stop for a hyphen in the model number, they are virtually identical. It wasn’t a model that I owned but it
followed the same basic pattern of two small plastic boxes, connected together
by a long length of 2-core cable. One of the boxes, the ‘Master’ contains a
simple audio amplifier and the battery; the other one, called the ‘Sub’ just
has a call button, capacitor and a speaker, which doubles up as a microphone.
The mode of operation is elegantly simple. With the Master switched off either
station can call the other by pressing the button, which generates a loud tone
heard through the speaker. When the Master is switched on the line from the Sub
is constantly open, so you can listen to whatever is going on in the vicinity
of the unit, which makes it useful as a baby alarm, or eavesdropping device.
The Master talks to the Sub by pressing the Call button.
This one was a boot sale find, and rather good one at
that, costing just 50 pence. It was all the more remarkable considering how
good the condition is, and that it came with the original box, cable and
instructions. There were a couple of very minor problems; at some point the
cable had been severed, which was very common. An attempt had been made to
repair it by twisting the ends together, and covering them with sticky tape. It
may even have worked, for a short while, but eventually it had gone open
circuit, and that may have been the reason it was put back in its box and
forgotten. A proper soldered repair took just a few minutes and the insulation
was restored using a couple of short lengths of shrink-wrap tubing. The other
issue was the two electrolytic capacitors, used for the Call function. As
usual these old caps had degraded. Modern replacements were
fitted and it was instantly firing on all cylinders, sounding as good as
new. Otherwise everything else was in excellent shape with few, if any, signs
of prolonged use. What Happened To It?
DUSTY DATA
First seen 1968 (Manual) Original Price 59/6 (£2.97) Value Today £10 (0316) Features 2-station intercom, tone calling, 2-transistor amplifier
(200mW), 58mm speaker/microphones, 20 metre (66 foot) connecting cable
terminated with 3.5mm mono minijacks, on/off volume Power req. 1
x PP3 9 volt battery Dimensions: 105
x 75 x 45mm Weight: 100g
(Master) 75g (sub) Made (assembled) in: Japan Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 5 Nokia 9210 Communicator, 2000
Fast forward three years, Nokia’s development teams
had been hard at work and the result is what you see here, the 9210
Communicator. In so many ways this was the inspiration for many of today’s
smartphones. Although it had the same clamshell design as its predecessor – touch
screen technology still had a way to go -- the main screen was now in colour.
It had a built-in web browser, email, and almost unique fax facilities plus a
well-specified suite of office applications for creating, viewing, sending and
receiving documents, spreadsheets etc. Extra programs, or 'apps' as we call them now, could be installed and it
had expandable user storage, courtesy of the (then) new, fangled SD memory card
– the first Nokia phone with this feature. There was also PC connectivity,
though the latter was via notoriously fiddly RS232 and infrared protocols. Back
then USB was still fairly new and only just starting to show up on mass-market
home computers and laptops.
When it behaves itself it is easy to use, though you
need to forget everything you’ve ever learned about using touch screens. It
relies on good old-fashioned button-prodding and wading through menus to get to
where you want to go and make things happen. Even so, after a few minutes it
becomes quite intuitive and the word processor could teach modern smartphone WP
apps a thing or two when it comes to ease of typing and editing. The ‘proper’
keyboard is a pleasure to use and although the narrow LCD screen is a bit
cramped it’s fine for editing text and composing messages, managing contacts
and your diary but it has to be said that web browsing and viewing images is hard going. This one has been gathering dust in my loft for at least 10 years. I can’t recall exactly when it came into my possession but
it’s almost certainly a leftover from my days reviewing mobile phones for various magazines. It ended its days as a test bed for accessories, chargers,
batteries and so on. It’s had quite a bit of use but apart from a few light
scuffs it is still in reasonably good shape, and it works, though the battery
no longer holds much of a charge and gives up the ghost after only an hour or
two. Like most borderline ‘vintage’ mobiles from that era it is digital and
still useable on the current GSM networks. It’s a real scene-stealer down the
pub, when someone pulls out the latest must-have smartphone whip out this old
lump and see which one gets the most attention… However for day-to-day use the
novelty quickly wears off. It’s fine for making and taking phone calls and
texts but it is no substitute for a modern smartphone. The narrow screen is
next to useless on the modern web and that clanky old processor is painfully
slow. What Happened To It? The 9210 did well, though the high costs of the buying and using it meant that most of them were bought or rented by corporate and executive users and it pretty much ruled the roost until BlackBerry got into their stride in 2002/3. The 9210 was flawed, though, and part of the problem was the Symbian operating system. It had been around a while but by the time the 9210 appeared it still had some annoying bugs that Nokia were slow to acknowledge, and even slower to fix. The other big drawback on this model was the lack of user memory and processor speed. It slowed the whole thing down and restricted the number of programs that could be running at the same time. For example, if you were doing something important on the web and a text message came in, or the phone rang, the chances are something would crash if you tried to switch between applications. Most of those problems were addressed by its
successor, the 9021i, released in 2002, but by then other manufacturers, most
notably BackBerry, were rapidly gaining ground with cheaper and more refined
models. Nokia’s brief lead quickly fizzled away. They failed to see which way the
market was going and by the mid noughties the Finnish giant, once a world
leader in mobile telephone and smartphone technology, didn’t react quickly
enough to the changing market. The rise of Apple and Google seemed to catch
them by surprise and when they eventually caught on to what was happening,
they backed the wrong horse by teaming up with Microsoft and its Windows Phone
operating system. Original 9000 Communicators are now collector’s items and attract some fancy prices but second generation models like the 9210 are still quite
plentiful on ebay though prices have been steadily rising. Until fairly recently
you could pick up a presentable 9210 with plenty of life left in it for a few
pounds. Now you would be lucky to find a working fixer-upper for less than £40.
Clean ones start at £60 or so and mint boxed models regularly sell for £100 or
more. The message is clear. If you want one don’t hang about, and if you want
it for everyday use it will be a short-lived diversion so
don’t give up your smartphone! DUSTY DATA
First seen 2000 Original Price £1000 Value Today £50.00
(0116) Features Phone: GSM 900/1800, SMS, email, fax, ringtones (WAV, RNG,
WVE, AU), speaker/speakerphone, Symbian operating system, 52MHz 32-bit ARM
processor 16Mb onboard memory (14Mb applications, 2Mb user), front screen: mono
LCD 29 x 22mm 80 x 48 pixels. PDA: main screen: TFT colour LCD (4096 colours)
110 x 35mm, 640 x 200 pixels. PDA functions: Word, Excel, PowerPoint PDF
viewer, web browser (WAP, HTML, Java, video player), IR port, built in speaker,
RS232 port, fold out antenna Power req. Rechargeable
Li-ion battery type BLL3 3.7v, 1300mA Dimensions: 160
x 55 x 28 mm Weight: 250g Made (assembled) in: Finland Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 6 Quali-Craft Slimline Intercom Telephone Set, 1965
On the plus side it is exceptionally easy to use. To
call the other handset all you have to do is press the white button on the
front. The other person picks up the handset and this releases a small
spring-loaded switch on the underside, which puts both units into phone mode. A
circuit diagram is helpfully moulded into the battery compartment covers, which
you may just be able to make out in the picture above.
What Happened To It? It was made in Japan by Kanto Gosei Kogyo for a US
company called Quali-Craft Corporation of Flushing, New York. I have been
unable to find out much about eiher of them but it appears that Quali-Craft was wound up
in the early 1990s. I have given it a speculative date of 1965, which may be
out by a couple of years either way, there’s nothing on the phones or packaging
to say for certain, but everything about it screams mid 60s, especially the box
design. It was available in a range of typically vivid colours, and the shape
ties in neatly with Ericofon Cobra phone, which was introduced in the States in
the mid 1960s This one turned out to be something of a bargain as I
have subsequently seen them changing hands for between £20 and £50, though
sellers normally claim that the higher priced examples are in as-new condition
with intact boxes and instructions. There are not many of them around but enough
for serious collectors who can afford to be choosy. However, there’s a lot to
be said for cheap fixer-uppers like this one and it doesn’t take much to get
them back into showroom condition; even tatty cardboard boxes can be tarted up without compromising their originality too much. Sixties tech is a rapidly growing area of
interest for collectors and toys have always been popular so prices for off-beat
gadgets like this, which have been largely ignored up until now, can only
increase in the long term. DUSTY DATA
First seen 1965? Original Price £10? Value Today £10
(1215) Features Two-station phone-style intercom, carbon microphones,
magnetic earphones, mechanical (motor-driven) call bell, 45 foot (13.6 metres)
connecting cable Power req. 4
x 1.5volt C cells Dimensions: 248
x 80 x 100mm Weight: 280g Made (assembled) in: Japan Hen's Teeth (10 rarest): 6 Shira WT-605CB Walkie Talkies, 1979
Those of us who were around at the time and involved
in the CB madness are probably cringing by now, having done our best to forget
that embarrassing period, but it all came back to haunt me when my gadget
hunting brother presented me with this pair of Shira WT-605CB Walkie talkies.
Included with the outfit was the original instruction sheet, almost a third of
which is devoted to CB Slang – and if you fancy a wince you can see it in all
its glory in the Manuals section of dustygizmos.
The justification for the CB slang dictionary is
WT-605’s built-in 27MHz receiver, which tunes over the 40 AM channels used by
the US system. This was never legal in the UK but it was very widely used,
before the UK government gave into pressure and legalised a wimpish FM system
(also on 27MHz) in 1981. The popularity of illicit AM CB was mainly due to a
thriving black market in contraband American ‘rigs’ mostly imported from
European countries where it was allowed, or at least tolerated. This is all
academic though, and it is highly doubtful that the CB receiver feature on the
WT-605CB ever worked. The tuning function is manual, rather than crystal
controlled, making it impossible to discriminate between adjacent channels and
the telescopic antenna would have a tough time picking up transmissions more
than a few hundred metres away.
Brother Pete found this set at his local Sunday car
boot sales, in deepest Dorset. He paid just £5.00 for them, which was something
of a bargain as it came in its original box, complete with the poly packing,
and the all-important instructions. Both units are in extremely good condition
and look as though they have hardly been used. One of them worked straight
away, the other one was as dead as a doornail; it must have happened quite
early on and it was probably the reason there was minimal wear and tear. Luckily it
was the easiest (and one of the commonest) faults to fix. One of the wires to
the battery clip had broken, almost certainly as a result of its original owner
pulling too hard to detach the 9 volt PP3 battery. All of the functions worked, though as
per usual, the performance was awful. The range is around 50 metres and sound
quality is dreadful, but it’s worth remembering that the 70s and 80s were
simpler times. In the years before mobile phones any form of wireless
communication would have been something of a novelty, especially for a
youngster. The CB receiver appeared to be working but it was difficult to be
certain. Apparently there are still a few AM CBers out there, but none of them
were within range at the time of testing.
What Happened To It? Cheap toy walkie talkies are still with us, as are
their more effective grown up cousins but the world has moved on and these days
most pre-teens are more interested in communicating over the Internet. Vintage
models like the WT-605CB are becoming quite scarce, though on the face of it
this is not an especially unusual model. It was one of several thousand
designs around at that time, though the CB receiver feature does set it apart
from the crowd and gives it a modest rarity value, possibly as much as £20 to
£30 on ebay if a couple of excitable bidders got carried away. Other types have become seriously
collectible, though, and are now fetching some very impressive prices. The one’s to
look out for are early examples from the 60s and 70s, and their appeal
increases dramatically if they’re a novelty design with a tie-in to a popular TV
series, movie or well-known cartoon character from the period. Needless to say if they
are in pristine condition and boxed you can start talking serious money and
it’s not unusual for mint examples to change hands for £100 or more. DUSTY DATA
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