The Portable Telephone Company

When you’re providing communications in a makeshift response center, it’s often helpful for different participants there to be able to be able to talk directly with each other. W8ERD expanded his ham radio “go-kit” to include internal communications capability accessible to all.

BOB DIXON

The Portable Telephone Company is the result of several years of on-and-off effort to create a system that could be used in disasters or temporary use anywhere. It interconnects cellphones, corded phones and the ham radio cloud. The system initially was installed in a luggage train case, but like most things it grew to require the addition of a branch office (Photos A, B, and C). Referring to Figure 1, the heart of the system is the wireless router, to which everything connects. The PBX makes for easy dialing, allowing simple extensions such as 23, rather than the much more difficult IP addresses such as 192.168.0.105 that would otherwise have to be used. The PC allows the administrator to log into the router and the PBX, to be sure everything…

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CQ Amateur Radio (Digital) - 1 Issue, October 2023

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