SILVER BOX BORN IN U.K. ----------------------- by Tamlyn Gam There was an article about the construction of a silver box in the Winter 1989/90 issue and it led me to wonder how this would work in the United Kingdom and Europe. Much of the UK is still using pulse dialing and the use of tone phones is only just spreading. (Most still convert the tone to a pulse for the sake of the antiquated phone system.) As the use of tone systems spreads, now at an increasing pace, there would seem to be a rich area for experiment here. It is not easy to come across a tone phone over here so I had to look for another source for the box parts. The main use here of tones is to control remote devices over telephone lines. These services which are common in the US are only just beginning to come into general use here, but we are now able to use tone controlled answerphones and tone controlled services such as voice banks and bank services. With the lack of tone exchanges and phones, the suppliers of such services have been offering small tone generators to prospective customers (sometimes free). Any hacker worth his salt will have one or three. I dug out one of mine and pulled it to pieces and, yes, it was run by a 5087 chip. A quick look at the circuit showed it to be the same as the phone described in the earlier article, so I filted a changeover switch as suggested and am now the proud owner of a silver box. I am not sure just what I can do with it but time will tell. The received wisdom is that the extra tones are not used in the UK, but I see that the telephone workers are equipped with tone generators having 16 buttons. An "innocent" question as to what all those extra buttons were for has not yet yielded results - but it will. In the meantime I will poke the extra tones about to see what they do and report back. I do work in an office with an internal tone phone service with national links to the public network so I have lots of places to experiment. I will report back here and in the meantime will see what our US colleagues turn up as they blaze the trail.