Phoneline Extention via Airwaves?

Vantage asks: " A recent project of mine has run into a snag. I am looking for something that would alow me to extend the reach of some phone lines out to the parking spaces of a truck stop. www.smartrunk.com almost does this, but the cost is very high. Around $50,000. Does Slashdot know of any better solutions?"

More details please

[bluGill]

I think I need more details, because I've come up with several obvious answers, and I would assume you are smart enough to have looked at them.

So, why will not a cell phone work? (perhaps one with a data connector) Why won't a wal-mart cordless phone work? Why can't you run underground phone wire to each parking space? (In the north they already run electric to parking spaces so that people can plug cars in in winter, and I would imangine trucks would like having 110 at their parking spots anyway. Toss some cat 5 in there too while your at it and you have a truck stop for geeks)

What are you trying to solve. I've seen several ask /. questions that on further examination shows the questioner asked the wrong questions, there was a better solution that his question prevented getting an answer to.

It's called 26 AWG twisted pair.

[Tau Zero]

So long as you don't want to do anything more than connect a Ma Bell-compatible phone line to the truck, just about anything will do. Ma Bell's children still use pretty much the same thing, with a somewhat tougher jacket, and bury it.

If I were doing this I would just bury a conduit going from parking space to parking space and pull cable though it. Bring the cable up at the parking-space pylons, terminate one pair at each pylon in an RJ-11 phone jack in a weatherproof enclosure; the trucker snakes a cable with a normal phone plug out to the pylon, and he's live. Leave a few spare pairs for expansion or to route around broken wires. At your central building (you will have one, won't you?) connect the pairs from the lot to the outgoing lines, maybe with a switch so you can activate and deactivate them at will. Adding MOV's and lightning arresters is probably a good idea.

That's the hard way. The easy way is to get a bunch of lines, connect each one to a 900 MHz spread-spectrum portable phone, and pass out handsets along with the parking receipts. You might want to collect a deposit on the handsets.

If you are using a PBX that doesn't use standard Bell phones (say, in order to do per-call billing or restrict callers to local/toll-free calls), you need to get the specs from the PBX mfgr.
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Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called a cordless phone. look into it.

Do you need data capability or not?

[Andy Dodd]

If you want to pass data over the lines (modem), I don't know of a solution, other than the aforementioned "Just use wire" comment.

If you just need to do voice, you can probably go to your local K-Mart or Radio Shack and buy a phone-line extender system. Basically one end plugs into the phone line and a power supply, and you plug a phone and another power supply into the other half of the system. They're manufactured by RCA among other people. Probably made by every major consumer electronics manufacturer. I don't have product names, unfortunately... I know my family has one lying somewhere around the house.

Same basic thing as a cordless phone, except you plug any 'ole phone into it.

PBX or POTS?

[Inferno]

Howdy Vantage,

I'm currently looking to get a cordless extension for our office, which has a Norstar Meridian PBX system.. I haven't got a quote on the price, but I'm sure it is less than 50,000. What the cordless extension does it provide all the functions of a normal extension (link, hold, multi-line pickup, etc) in a wireless handset. There are fairly-inexpensive passive repeaters that you can put in place if the unit will be used over a wide area.

Now if you don't need a cordless extension for a PBX, look at using cordless 900 mhz POTS phones. They seem to do a pretty good job and are fairly inexpensive.

Hope this helps,
Joseph