Mittwuch,25 März, 2020
Europe and Switzerland haveen plagued by COVID-19 also known as Corona Virus. Things have been pretty grim. In Switzerland going out is not forbidden but all shops are closed beside groceries stores and pharmacies.
Even if is not formally forbidden to go out everyone here is keeping to the rules so will go out only when is strickly necessary e.g. to buy food or to the pharmacy.
Logistics have put a bit of a stop to the rotary mobile phone project (kits delivery delayed etc.) but I did order a trimline rotary phone before I found a place where I could order the dials directly.
I came across a new old stock phone that arrived just before this global pandemic
This is such a good specimen that it cannot be butchered for its dial. It appears to be a new old stock and came in the original box.
What is missing thou is the cable to connect the headset to the base and a IWV to MFV/Voip adapter (else you can’t dial in a voip or MFV modern telephone network).
The first obstacle to my retro phone usage was the missing cable. I discovered that these cables with spiral are not widely available now (and given the pandemic I was restricted to local suppliers). To add more complications theere are apparently both RJ9, RJ8 and what not.
With a bit of searching I found the schematics of the trimline phones where the connector type is named “h4du”. Some googling and it seems that is RJ 11 but none of these available matched this so I went and ordered and RJ 9 cable from “Decelect Forgos” for less than 10$.
The adapter from the company “Reiner” was much more expensive, around 95$.
Today I received both:
the RJ9 cable works fine!
okay it is not yellow like the phone but I like the black/yellow contrast and the cable seems indeed high quality and not too thick.
Setting up the adapter was a bit more trickly because of my provider router configuration but I did manage to make it work.
and here are the videos!
Allright here is a small bug/feature the phone ringing is extremely silent!
Now this is not been caused by the converter so is either the phone having some issues or (more likely) the router not delivering enough energy for a more energetic ringtone!
here some more photos of this beauty
So I started wanting to have a rotary mobile phone asap. it didn’t work out (yet) but I did manage to have a “Silent” fully working rotary phone!
This is the type of DIY that I like: sourcing some cables and putting things together is fun but having to solder stuff is where I draw a line :)!
back home