Mar
10
What equipment do I need to take callers on my TV show?
ByI have a high school sports television show and I wish to take live callers. How can I do this? What model of telephone would work best? Can you suggest a good, economical piece of equipment for us to purchase in order to have two-way communication from my mic to the telephone line and from the telephone line to our audio mixer?
1 Comments
March 10th, 2010 at 4:22 pm
The easiest method, is to use one of those “Sucker” type mic pickups. These can be had for only a few bucks, and you just stick the sucker-pad to the phone handset to record or monitor incoming calls.
There is a problem with regulations.
Not sure about America, but here in New Zealand, it is actually illegal for anyone to connect any device to the phone line which is not “Telepermitted”.
A Telepermit is a certificate of compliance issued by the Telephone compay, stating that the device complies with their regulations.
Attaching a device which perhaps causes buzzing or other problems on the line, is actually a prosecutable offence here, if it is found to be the cause of problems on the network.
But it actually can be very easily done with a 600:600 ohm transformer and a few other parts.
Download the following image:
You may not need the pre-amp(based on the two transistors on the right of the image), if your phone line audio is already quite loud. In this case, omit the entire circuit, and simply connect your audio feed to your mixer to the secondary side of the 600-ohm transformer. Leave the 100n cap in place to isolate the transformer winding, from the input to your mixer.
This circuit is not approved – use at your own risk, but it does work, and works well.
It will allow you to use any of the audio from the phone line, including your own responses back to the caller, and, naturally, the caller too.