A dial tone off and on the road

[pickpaul]

Ive seen a number of conversions that are wired to plug into a phone line which give a dial tone on several phones in the bus.

Why not plug in one of these...

http://www.payphone.com/GT50-GSM-Terminal.html

and stick in a cheap prepaid gsm sim and give your bus it's own number :-)

Just saw it and couldn't help but think of a bus application.

Cheers, Paul.

[CrabbyMilton]

It does look interesting but unless you are one to kackel on the phone non stop, a regular old cell phone should suit the purpose without all of the fuss of hooking things up.

[wyle.e.kyote]

This is what we are using on the bus ... and at home  ...     We just leave the phones on the charger and use the bus phones until we want to be portable.

http://gigaset.com/us/en/product/GIGASETL700MLINK.html

[TomC]

All that wireless stuff is great until you get hacked by some low life that steals your information.  Hard wiring a bus for land line is still a good idea.  I wired my bus with a 6 wire telephone cable to be able to get 3 phone lines in if wanted (and this was back in 1995 I did that).  Good Luck, TomC

[wyle.e.kyote]

All that wireless stuff is great until you get hacked by some low life that steals your information.  Hard wiring a bus for land line is still a good idea.  I wired my bus with a 6 wire telephone cable to be able to get 3 phone lines in if wanted (and this was back in 1995 I did that).  Good Luck, TomC

If the lowlife is close enough to hack into a class 2 bluetooth device, you'll be able to smell them.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth    Landline hacking can be done anywhere along the wire, and with a sensitive enough induction amplifier the lowlife won't even leave any click sounds .     

That said, you can wire the bus with wire and use a pots circuit or cellular and keep the same wiring. (smartphone not required)

[Tim Strommen]

This is a bit out of the league of many on the board here - but I'm sure that some will appreciate it for what it is:

Asterisk OpenSource PBX

OpenSource PBX which runs on thin Linux installs.  Basically you can do VoIP or POTS (or both).  System allows trunking between systems and you can do TLS (SSL) secure data over the internet.  I run a 4G-LTE modem and 802.11a/b/g/n modem in my truck (CarPuter) with a VPN tunnel to my home network.  I have a phone program (free for personal use) which rides that VPN tunnel back to my home phone server which runs on a $50 netbook with a broken LCD (for now, new hardware in progress).  Anywhere I can get either wifi or 2G/3G/4G signal (Verizon), I can receive or make calls, get voicemails, email, etc.

If one were to take a second cheap netbook and (using an adapter board) drop in one of these: Asterisk 4-line PCIe analog to PBX card you could allow any SIP (VoIP) phone or phone program to make calls over your home phone system OR directly over the public POTS phone network.  I have a 1-800 number that I can use from anywhere in the US/Canada which I can dial into for any phone, and then using a login (etc) I can dial back out to any number at my cheapest rate ($0.01/min).  It's like my own personal calling card - you can make that happen automatically if you have an Asterisk PBX on both sides.

If your vehicle phone (SIP, POTS) is set up like an extension to your home phone system, you can have it find you wherever you are (Home, Bus, Truck [in my case], Cell), and it can screen callers, or you could transfer a call to your better-half, and do all other kinds of trickery (do not call filtering, hours of operation call blocking, integration with home automation, etc) that would normally cost you tens (and possibly hundreds) of thousands of dollars if you bought an older task-specific phone system to do the same.  My home phone bill averages about $12/month, and I spent about $300 on hardware including these nice mutli-line SIP phones.

Food for thought.

-Tim