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Vintage Telephony and Telecomms Vintage Telephones, Telephony and Telecomms Equipment |
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17th Mar 2018, 5:10 pm | #1 | ||||
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Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
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I must admit that I did wonder after powering it up whether I was in breach of frequency use regulations by doing so.
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17th Mar 2018, 5:52 pm | #2 |
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
Apparently Hutchison started the roll-out here in Manchester, and there were certainly a lot access points round and about. Weren't they called Telepoints?
Usually on parades of shops. Each base station supported two simultaneous calls, so I imagine two BT lines would have to be installed. I wonder what incentive the host proprietor was given.
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17th Mar 2018, 6:13 pm | #3 |
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
yes I remember seeing the Rabbit access-points in shopping-centres and also on rail-station platforms/waiting-areas and they definitely had them in Terminal3 at Heathrow because someone I know had a Rabbit and made a call while we were waiting to see him off on his flight.
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17th Mar 2018, 6:50 pm | #4 |
Octode
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
Hi, from memory I'm sure that Dixons stores used to sell the Rabbit phones and the Dixon's stores in our area (latterly Curry's/Dixon's) had Rabbit access points.
I'm certain I saw a Rabbit sign outside Curry's in Redcar some years ago. Regards Andrew |
17th Mar 2018, 6:51 pm | #5 |
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
When I was at Sinclair the chap in the next lab was working on using the tuner from the FTV1 for Rabbit.
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17th Mar 2018, 7:14 pm | #6 |
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
A number of London Underground tube stations had them. I recall seeing the logos on the platform when I used to commute to central London.
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17th Mar 2018, 7:16 pm | #7 |
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
A couple of historically relevant links:
https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/th...of-the-rabbit/ and http://www.cntr.salford.ac.uk/comms/telepoint.php [interesting in that it lists Phonepoint, Zonephone and Callpoint as the other even-less-well-remembered members of the "telepoint services" quadumbrate alongside Rabbit]. and http://www.heritageandhistory.com/co...it-telephones/ Back in 2002 (it seems so long ago...) the BBC did an article on how Rabbit was dead-and-buried even then: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2175804.stm I guess we can put Rabbit into the same 'busted flush' category as the 3D-TV hype from a few years back. |
17th Mar 2018, 7:43 pm | #8 |
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
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17th Mar 2018, 9:00 pm | #9 |
Heptode
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
Mercury also had a telepoint system called Callpoint but I don’t know how many lines were on the base stations bur they were BT ones.
They had Callpoints in Shell garages and being a Mercury field engineer when I filled up my Mercury branded van I used to get accosted by the managers thinking I’d come to fix the callpoint because customers were complaining it didn’t work. John |
17th Mar 2018, 9:05 pm | #10 |
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
I recall Rabbit being marketed as "the phone box in your pocket" or something like that, this was at the time I used to carry a pager and a phonecard. The system could have become established if the cost of a proper mobile hadn't plumeted the way it did at the time.
T
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17th Mar 2018, 10:22 pm | #11 |
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
I remember buying a Rabbitt receiver box from Greenweld in the early nineties for parts. I seem to remember a steel box within a box with a GRP top cover housing 2 small aerials.
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17th Mar 2018, 10:58 pm | #12 |
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
It wasn't just the falling price of real mobile phones that finished off Rabbit and the other telepoint systems. They simply weren't very useful in the first place.
The Rabbit phone only allowed you to make calls at a telepoint. You couldn't receive any calls. The telepoints were mostly located at shops, railway stations etc. Those locations usually had public payphones nearby. So why carry a bulky handset around with you, when you could simply use a public payphone? The Rabbit had no great advantage - in fact it was a lot less useful, since there were far more public payphones than Rabbit telepoints. Also the rival telepoint companies like Mercury didn't allow 'roaming', i.e. Rabbit phones couldn't use Mercury telepoints or vice versa. Looking back, it's pretty obvious the whole idea was doomed from the start. Lessons were learned. Hutchison Telecom, the company behind the Rabbit telepoints, went on to set up the highly successful Orange mobile phone network. And I believe some of the technology in the Rabbit phone was used in the DECT cordless phones still in use today. The Rabbit handsets could be used with a base station as home cordless phones, so were not totally useless after the telepoints were shut down. Indeed, I still have a couple of Rabbit phones and base stations, bought long after the telepoint closure. The first one I used as a home cordless phone for a few years, then it stopped working. When I tried to connect to the base, the handset display says LINK then ERROR after a couple of seconds. I then bought a second system at a car boot sale, but the second handset was totally dead. I haven't really bothered trying to fix them, since used but working DECT cordless phones can be picked up for next to nothing at car boot sales. |
18th Mar 2018, 12:01 am | #13 |
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
Although I never had one, they were actually quite useful in the absence of a proper mobile phone. I used to carry a pager when out and about, and when paged I would have to find a public phone and call in. This wasn't always easy even then, especially when driving. While the Rabbit system was operating, most corner shops had an access point, so you could just pull up outside one and make the call.
Of course, the arrival of small and cheap cellular phones made the system obsolete almost overnight. I remember Dixons selling off phones and base stations cheaply after the system closed (they made good domestic cordless phones). |
18th Mar 2018, 6:55 am | #14 |
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
Wasn't that the Zonephone base station? I still have one that I got from Greenweld.
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18th Mar 2018, 9:03 am | #15 |
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
Fascinating snippettes of history emerging here: one thing I never fully understood though - if you were away-from-home and someone phoned your 'Rabbited' landline number, what happened? Presumably the home base-station was smart enough and knew it wasn't able to contact its handset, but then what?
Did it send some sort of recorded message/divert-to-an-answering-service, or did it just ring out? Given the mention of "Rabbit pagers" in one of the articles upthread, I suspect there was some way for the system to send you a page to indicate you had a missed call - you presumably then had to find a zone with a Rabbit signal to call in and find out what was up? |
18th Mar 2018, 10:24 am | #16 |
Nonode
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
I had one of the early pre-production Zonephone ones, given to me by a friend who helped develop them. It consisted of a bare PCB with two short antennas sticking out of one side, plus a final-version handset. Connected to our telephone line it worked well as a simple cordless phone around the house. The only problem was its rather 'ungraceful' handling of poor reception. Instead of just muting and then recovering, it made some very loud clanging and popping sounds through the earpiece.
IIRC, it worked in the 860 MHz band. I scrapped it during a clearout a while back and now I wish I hadn't!
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18th Mar 2018, 11:05 am | #17 | ||
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
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I think it was expected that one had a normal 'phone connected to the line as well, given that a socket doubler was included in the Rabbit pack. Quote:
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18th Mar 2018, 12:45 pm | #18 | |
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
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I seem to remember that they were extremely well made.
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18th Mar 2018, 3:06 pm | #19 | |
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
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18th Mar 2018, 3:16 pm | #20 | |
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Re: Rabbit - the almost mobile telephone of bygone times
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On a separate point, one of the minus bits referred to above was the user manual. Simply as a matter of interest, does anyone know of a downloadable copy of this anywhere on t'internet? On this occasion, Google has not been my friend - just pointing me to lots of advice on looking after furry animals.
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