Phones for very small office

[Bill]

A friend has asked about the best way to change all the 3 phones in her small office so that they can be used with headsets, but also with some sort of easy way for a young person on work experience to be able to listen in to the conversations.

As far as I know, the phones are used one at a time and are all hanging across the one line, so it just seems to be a matter of either buying phones with one headset socket and perhaps hanging some sort of phone listening device across the incoming line, or maybe finding phones with a second headset socket.

It might be nice to have some sort of wireless monitoring for the snoop person to save a lot of running around when the phone rings.

I see that Sanyo make a cheap recording interface for hanging across the incoming line. Has anyone ever used one of these? What about the level differences between incoming and outgoing speech and is it microphone or line level? Are there likely to be any issues with REN numbers?

Alternatively, can anyone suggest any simple commercial system that might achieve something like this?

[Jim K]

what format are the sockets? would a "personal stereo" headset adaptor (e.g. as used on some planes) be any use?

IIRC a line has a max REN of 4? & modern phones are usually a lot lower REN than old ones, so would expect no bother tho a peak at the Sanyo's tech specs would probably confirm that?

I;m sure my "domestic" Siemens Gigaset setup has an option to allow all 3 phones to work as a "conference call" and allow all 3 (cordless) handsets to work on same call.... wasn;t expensive either =A340 odd? shared phonebook if rqd too.

Cheers Jim K

[The Natural Philosopher]

look at plantronics.

[Paul D Smith]

A friend has asked about the best way to change all the 3 phones in her small office so that they can be used with headsets, but also with some sort of easy way for a young person on work experience to be able to listen in to the conversations.

As far as I know, the phones are used one at a time and are all hanging across the one line, so it just seems to be a matter of either buying phones with one headset socket and perhaps hanging some sort of phone listening device across the incoming line, or maybe finding phones with a second headset socket.

It might be nice to have some sort of wireless monitoring for the snoop person to save a lot of running around when the phone rings.

I see that Sanyo make a cheap recording interface for hanging across the incoming line. Has anyone ever used one of these? What about the level differences between incoming and outgoing speech and is it microphone or line level? Are there likely to be any issues with REN numbers?

Alternatively, can anyone suggest any simple commercial system that might achieve something like this?

++++++++++

If all three phones are one one line then you can use one phone to make/receive the call and a second on the same line to listen in. What you want are phones which have:

1. Headphone sockets (as someone else said, Plantronics headsets seem to be the leaders)

1. A speaker, but no microphone. When you "pick-up" (using a special button to activate the speaker), you can hear what's going on "dial tone, dialing, ringing, pick-up, other person saying 'hello'? etc before you switch to handset of headset to talk back. Presumably you can use these in the same way to "listen in".

I have models similar to these...

?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item565204ee9cCheck out eBay. Sometime ago I purchased 50 (literally) head-set enabled phones for about £20.00. It had to have cost the guy more than that to ship them but I sorted through the box, picked the few I wanted (I really only needed two + spares!) and gave the rest to Oxfam. It was much cheaper than buying new and I tested the phones beforehand of course.

At the time, "regular" analogue phones were 10-a-penny as offices were upgrading to fancy new digital phones. I also got a couple of Plantronics headsets from eBay.

Alternatively/additionally, you might like to suggest a conference phone. old analog Polycom phones are not too expensive.

Paul DS.

[bert]

In message , Bill writes

I've got a device like that. Last night I decided to tidy up my bag of "they will be useful one day) cables and came across it. It was intended to plug in to a recorder and has a male mon 3.5 jack on the end. Just a matter of getting a suitable female-female adapter or plug n to the line-in socket of a suitable device. One advantage is that the wep will hear but will not be heard. I have no use for it You can have it if you want it. Reply to is valid

[Bill]

Many thanks to everyone who replied, and I have emailed Bert.

I have just established that there are actually 2 lines into the office on a "Featureline" arrangement which seems to mean that by sending codes back to the exchange, you can divert between the lines or set the second line to participate. Usually the phones hang across the one line on the main number, so it's probably as I described.

I had looked on the Plantronics website without seeing any actual phones, so Paul's pointer was useful. I've rung BT and actually eventually got a knowledgeable lady, who was very helpful, and confirmed that Featureline office phones for use with the service don't have headset ports, which seems pretty short sighted. But you can hit extra keys on ordinary phones to do the exchange switching.

I did suddenly remember good old key and lamp units, and thought they would have done almost everything she wants, but there doesn't seem to be any modern equivalent that I can find.

Thanks again to everyone.

[Owain]

There was a push a few years ago to sell featureline to small businesses as it locks them in to BT for call charges. It may be needlessly expensive.

It might be worth getting the two lines de-featurelined, set up on the main number with auxiliary working, and bringing them into a small PBX.

Something like a Meridian Norstar Compact is available cheaply secondhand, it's easy to set up conference calls so two handsets can listen in, or a handset can be used with Group Listen, whereby the person uses a handset but the phone speaker also works for people listening (but it's not hands-free so no background noise).

Norstars use systemphones but headsets are available for them.

Owain