[VoIP] Just bought a Western Electric 202

[John R. Covert]

Grrr.  Thanks for the heads up.  I just made the assumption that
Mark Treutelaar was providing some sort of network, most likely a
mini-network hidden in the base like other ebay sellers were doing.
Mark has sold dozens of these on ebay and all the feedback is
"sounds great" and "can't believe it's eighty years old" and so on.

Talked to him today.  No network.  Grrrrr.  "Even without a network
it will sound better than a cellphone."  Great.  I'm a ulaw stickler
here on VoIP; I expect my wired phone service to sound better than
a cellphone.  "Those collectors say you'll burn out the transmitter
or receiver, but I've never had a problem."  Well, I don't want to
be the first one with a problem.

I have a bunch of old 2500 sets around, and I can make a subset
(which has to be out of sight to keep the wife happy anyway, so it
will be under the floorboards above the false ceiling in the room
below it where I just mounted the Bell Chime last night).

I checked with Ray Kotke to see if he also made molded covers to
fit 500/2500 bases; he doesn't, so I'll just leave the regular
cover on the set, and maybe I can even dig up a dial blank, and
also keep my eye out for a trashed 500/2500 with a good network.

I'll have to order a 5-conductor line cord (only four are needed
for the older induction-style networks, but the 425 network needs
five).  Odis LeVrier at www.houseoftelephones.com makes exactly what
I need, which I'll order as soon as I'm sure of the exact color
match with the handset cord; I think this is where Mark buys his
cords anyway.

As I had mentioned, I needed to buy an IAXy to put dial-pulse
phones on my Asterisk (the Cisco ATAs only take DTMF).  It
arrived this morning, and I hooked it up to a 2500 set which
has now replaced the 2565.  I had to do a lot of dialplan
work for it; all my other stations are on smart adapters that
have dialplans built in, and the IAXy does overlapped dialing,
talking its way through your Asterisk dial plan as you go,
so the stuff I had done wasn't quite as specific as needed
to eliminate post-dialling delay.  I haven't had time yet to
make it accept "#" as a terminator.  That's a royal pain,
because you have to create entries with the "#" at the end up
to some ridiculous maximum, as well as without "#" at the
end so that timing also works.

I think the IAXy is an amazingly underengineered product.  The
fact that the MAC address is not printed on the outside of the
device really annoys me; the only way you can find it out in
order to tell your DHCP server the fixed address you'd like to
use for it is to let it grab a dynamic one first, and then look
in the DHCP server's database, disconnect it, clean up the
database to remove the temporary lease, and then do what you
shoulda been able to do from the get-go.

The IAXy echo problem is annoying, too, and I really wonder
how it will do with the 202.  It isn't terribly bad with the
2500 I have on there now.  What's interesting is that pulling
the handset off (unplugging its modular connector) is enough
to create an impedance mismatch that starts a bunch of echo.
Makes me think it really doesn't have much echo cancelling at
all built in, and just relies on the hybrid doing a good job
of absorbing everything.

Wouldn't it be cool (since there will only be one telephone
on this station) if I knew where to tap into the inside of
the IAXy to make the 202 into a four-wire phone; I'd have to
add a little sidetone circuit, but that would certainly be
the way to go with "low-cost" (so they say) ATAs for single
sets.

/john