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I Forge Iron

Wired Intercom


Chris C

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I've got a phone line that runs from my house 50 feet out to my shop.  When my wife needs me, she picks up her cell phone and calls our home phone...................which I answer in the shop.  When I need her, I call her cell-phone from the land-line phone in the shop.  Makes a nice intercom system for us.  But we are getting ready to disconnect from AT&T and forever give up our land-line.   I still want some way for her to be able to contact me in the shop.............or me her in the house.  My shop is a metal building and there's barely radio reception in there...............but absolutely no cell-phone reception.  Does anyone here know of a fairly inexpensive hard-wired intercom system I could hook up between the two structures?  Any ideas? 

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Standard intercom system should work with the old phone lines without too much monkeying around.  Many places are still disposing of old Radio Shack stock so I'd bet it can be fond on e-bay or similar.  The local pharmacy in my tiny town...a former RS distributor...was recently selling much of their back stock at about 20% of the list pricing just to get it the heck out of their back room.

Or...the old magneto crank telephones can also be tweaked to work like that--they're actually pretty simple machines and give you that cool retro vibe.  There is some information on the net regarding that but the phones do set you back a bit of cash.  Quite often in "the good old days",  farmers would use the barbed wire fence as their phone cable to the neighbor's or farm hand's shack--why bother stringing new wire when you've already strung old? 

 

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"Those were the days", huh!  Had myself a powerful base station with a 50' tower under a great big directional antenna and a D104 "lollipop" mike on the desk.  Those were "shining times" for sure.  Not a care in the world.

But I digress.  Intercom problem solved by a 9 volt batter and a resistor.  Cheap at twice the price. :lol:

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Breaker breaker, Cross Pein, got your tuyere's on? 

50' antenna? Didn't that make your pickup sort of tippy? I'll bet driving under bridges is annoying and high tension lines down right THRILLING!

Frosty The Lucky.

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I grew up around a lot of truckers who all seemed to look like a cross between Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley with a little Bowser from Sha Na Na thrown in for good measure.I even would travel with a married couple that was really good friends with my mom and stepdad. When I was a kid I'd spend the summer with them and make like a thousand dollars. Doesn't sound like much but to a 12 year old I felt like J.P.Morgan. Anyway   my stepdad and mom had CB's in their vehicles and my SD had a base station with a monster antenna. If the environmental conditions were just right you could talk to people in Michigan all the way from Cincinnati. It also drove the neighbors crazy because he could do something and it would make the transmission come over their radios, TV's etc. I have very fond memories of talking on the CB when I was younger. 

Pnut

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Yup, cranking up the modulation and also having "more than legal" output power, would tend to mess with neighbor's receivers.  I never did that, but there was a guy on the other side of town who did and every time he depressed the switch on his microphone, he overpowered every transmitter in town.  A real pest, to say the least.  I lived in Oklahoma City and there were night's I could catch "skip" and talk all the way to Alaska and that was with a legal power level.

This has been fun walking down memory lane.  Those days were a lot of fun in our country.  Some of the best time in our country's history. 

Can't wait to get this new fiber optic internet system installed so I can drop my hard-wired land line.  That's when I'll be able to dive into the house-to-shop intercom system.  I think it'll be a fun project.

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I presently have a huge horn that is connected to the land line, pnut.  Is as irritating as the old Model-T Ford horn.  It can be heard above the sound of every single machine in the shop..........even when I have on a my lead lined shooting muffs.  I'm not quite sure how I'll connect it to a 9-volt system, but the horn itself is AC powered, so I'll have to figure that out.  When I originally set up my shop, I tried a light, but couldn't get it to work so I could always be aware it was activating.  The horn works great.  In fact, if I'm outside the building......in-between the house and shop or even down at the barn, some 50 feet away, I can hear it.  Just hope I can connect it into this intercom system.  Might need some help from an old-timer telephone man who understands all these old mechanical phones.  But I figured out how to get it to work before...............surely I can do it now.  We'll see.

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Back in the early '70s I went to the Christmas open house at the Western Electric plant in Indianapolis and one of their displays was a board with one of every type of phone ringer they made wired up for "testing".  Except for the one made for a Boiler Manufacturer's factory floor.  It would have been dangerous to let off in a regular room!

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Once upon a time there was a CB operator that had a very high powered setup, he was warned numerous times by his neighbors that he was interfering with TV and radio reception in the neighborhood, but he LOL and continued to use his powerful amplifier.  One of the neighbors happened to live directly next door to him and was also experienced in electrical work.  He decided he had enough of this guy, so built a  "jacob's ladder" and set it up in the attic at the end nearest the antenna of the obnoxious neighbor.  The next time the TV filled with static and rolling screen from the neighbors CB,  the electrician turned the Jacob's Ladder machine on for a short time, and after he turned it off, the static from the CB was gone, never to reoccur again, and the rest of the people lived happily every after

then end

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Have never heard of that, Steve.  Don't know what a "Jacob's" ladder is in reference to electronics.  But I did hear of one trick that can be used for folks like that.  I've heard all it takes is to take a straight pin and push it through the offending operator's antenna cable.  The first time he keys the mic it completely fries his expensive, over-powered and illegal power supply.  Some might call it "radio karma". :lol:

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If you search on:  jacob's ladder electrical device  you can see a bunch of pictures and videos of them. They were a common item in every old Frankenstein movie I have seen. They look like a set of rabbit ear antennas and are hooked up to a power supply that will start an arc between them at the base and then as the hot ionized air rises the arc rises up as well.

The pin trick, while effective, is illegal as well.  As we get older; some of us give more thought to avoiding the costs of legal entanglements.

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Hmmmmm, interesting.  I've seen those in movies, as you mentioned.  Can't figure out how they would affect an over-powered CB unit though.

Oh, and I never sunk to the levels of damaging other people's property.............not so much because of the possible legal entanglements, but moral responsibility.  Still, it sounded like a good idea every time this guy would "take over" the airwaves for an evening.  He'd just jive-talk and rave and rant.  No-one ever talked to him.  He was alone on the airwaves.  As soon as he'd key up, most everyone I knew would just turn off their units and go to bed.

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mostly it fills the air waves with so much static that he cant hear a thing until my friend turned the ladder off,  it worked as a jammer. I have no idea if it damaged the amplifier but I am sure his speakers didnt like it much either

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Legal entanglements are sometimes the least of the things to worry about in a series of escalations in a neighborhood dispute. Lots of times they end in tragedy. You never really know what someone is capable of doing or what other things might be going on with them. I prefer to be neighborly and try to compromise if at all possible. My neighbor when I was growing up was in a constant fued with another neighbor over the parking spot at the curb in front of his house on a public street. The guy ended up snapping after a year or so. You have to be careful 

Pnut

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They put out HUGE amounts of interference having one close to a large antenna designed to catch very faint signals is like asking someone to hold a cup while you pour water in it from a high pressure fire hose.

Remember how bad interference was on AM radio was when there were thunder storms around? The first type of radio used spark gap transmitters. They were outlawed internationally in 1934 due to the amount of interference they produced on more efficient radio systems.

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8 hours ago, Chris C said:

I'm not quite sure how I'll connect it to a 9-volt system, but the horn itself is AC powered, so I'll have to figure that out.  

A solid state relay (SSR) is one relatively simple solution to the academic question.  DC signal to control AC power.  The problem is that most insurance companies will require that all devices connected to the building's electrical system be listed and/or approved for the purpose.  It's my understanding that having an unlisted device connected voids your policy with some agencies.  Insurance adjustors have been known to deny an unrelated claim when they find proof of an unlisted device connected to the system.

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