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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Not the same thing but even in the early 80s, I would use a hybrid radio and landline system when I was on drilling rigs. You'd call the marine operator and they'd patch you through to a landline. Don't quite remember how it worked the other way.

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On the amateur radio side of the house, we had what we called phone patches. A radio repeater with a phone connection. Operating a radio with a touchpad, you would enter a code to enable the phone patch, then do the dialing. This was in no way a private call. Anything said on the phone went out over the open repeater. And even more interesting, any other ham could join in on your call. But ultimately, most hams would not do so out of respect.

While popular in the 80s and 90s, they obviously decreased in popularity as cell phone usage/coverage increased.

This entire video is HAM repeater patches[1] with different automation.

One key thing to note in the video is that placing a call to the mobile unit required knowing in advance what cell the unit would be in.

On the upside, they could ring a particular unit, meaning there must be a codewheel in the mobile unit to selective ring just that one, which is pretty sophisticated. That's roughly as complicated as doing pulse dialing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopatch

I was going to say, this looks like patching. My dad was doing this in the 70's (in the car) I believe.

The codes were five digits, and transmitted as FM dial pulses on 600 and 1500 cycles. The receiver had a toothed ratchet wheel with five pins that would follow the dial pulses. It was entirely electromechanical.

My Dad worked for the Canadian Coast Guard. One time (1980s) one of the crew got a call from home on ship-to-shore radio. It was his wife with a non-emergency but she called the ship. The entire ship turned around and went to port. I forget what it was for (where is the chequebook, where is the spare house key etc.?) but it was a huge embarrassment for the guy!

It must be one-way or something like that since it seemed the ship had to go in so he must not have been able to call back to his wife.

In NZ in the early 80s there was a "RadPhone" service for recreational boaters over VHF --- you could call the Coast Guard operator on a dedicated VHF channel, give them a phone number, and they'd make the call and connect it to that channel. Of course everyone else with a VHF radio could listen in.

Maybe the marine operator would call you, and then they'd patch you through to the landline?

Just don't remember. Possibly the marine operator radioed and the radio operator on the rig answered. The company also had its own radio room but it may have been easier/higher quality to use the marine operator for outbound than our main radio room.

But this was all 40 years ago so fuzzy on the details.

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