Here are some pictures of my high schools PA/bell System. The first one that was installed, was in 1988, when my school converted into a full on high school (was a seminary, then an all boys school, then a co-ed day school). The system was a Telecor 2. This is when they replaced the old bell system, which I recently discovered it was an http://i1147.photobucket.com/albums/o543/edwardsfan7/RMC2.jpg IBM system. I was on student council my last year, so I used the PA system daily since I did announcements, and played music. It had numerous problems with communication during announcements, and the motherboard even fried in December, 2012. It also had no volume control with the music, so sometimes the music was really soft, other times it was deafening. It was eventually replaced during March break with the Telecor XL. The bell system was fairly easy to program, and with both the systems, you could make your own bell tone, as well as being able to program 4 bell schedules with 64 events each. Here is the old system first:
The first picture was the old control console that was in the announcement room. The second picture is the new refurbished one that was put in after the system fried. The most annoying thing about these was doing the announcements with them. You had to hold down the ‘push to talk’ button to keep the mic on, it didn’t latch in.
This was the other control console that was located in the office. This one was used mainly by the secretaries to make announcements and page rooms during school. This one was used by picking up the phone and using the page feature, which it latched in.
The PA system in the announcement room. There were some features on the unit itself (which weren’t in use by then) such as the FM/AM radio, and the tape player. You can also see a key at the bottom, that was a key used to program the systems time functions. Now the new system:
This was the new system installed March 2013. I forgot to take a pic of the new unit, but there is the new console, paging microphone, and the new CD player. The console is unlike the old one, pretty much the same features, but one exception. This one latches in, as well as the new microphone with it. I don’t have a picture of the one in the office because it is the same.
Finally, the old systems final resting place was in the storage shed that was in the back of the school. Here are also some videos of both systems at work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtOhr-7iVcA&feature=youtu.be Old Telecor 2 system, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQUIfB6cFpk&feature=youtu.be New Telecor XL system (manual bell), and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulqp2Z3moxc&feature=youtu.be The new system with the automatic bell schedule.