Ikea Kallax is a great shelf for displaying an 80's VEF phones. I think I'll also add an ATA to this so all the phones would be usable.

I thought that this was happening only for a few years, but, no, look at the stamp on the bottom of the phone. It was "produced" in 1998! At least they were being patriotic and changed older "Made in USSR" to "Made in Latvia". So, the parts were not leftovers, but produced already in late 90's.

Well, they took the internals of these phones and stuffed into new (or leftover?) VEF TA-D cases. The one I have is this case. Look at the quality! It's awful! And, no, this was not done by someone at home, this was done on industrial scale!

At some point VEF stopped producing the phones, but imported used phones from the western countries like Germany. Imported phones were fixed, polished, rebranded, packed and sold as VEF phones. But what can be done with phones that can't be refurbished?
(Refurbished TAp-611, image source - etsy.com)

VEF was a big manufacturer of phones and consumer radio receivers in soviet Latvia. After USSR collapsed in 1991, big factory got split up. Phones were still produced, but they were behind the time. They still used rotary dials while western world used DTMF and didn't needed pulse mode anymore.

VEF TA-611D. This is a special phone. In a bad way. You might have seen similar phones in my posts before, but this is a late model and it shows post-soviet manufacturers inability to adapt to the changing demand after the collapse of the USSR.

Today I fixed the self-identification part of the teleprinter. Its original station ID is "Tornyakalns", a neighborhood in Riga, Latvia. The teleprinter comes from the local railway company, so I assume it was located in Torņakalns train station.
(railway station picture taken from Wikipedia)

Firat time using a micrograbbers to debug my firmware. Cool stuff.

I sorted some stuff in my lair, tested if my computers still work and some visitors came to help with testing. :D

Right now I'm doing this through this devboard, but I hope to create a useful adapter board in future.

Today I managed to get to the milestone - transmitting data from computer to the teleprinter. It's just a basic proof of concept, but it works!

I'm thinking abiut designing an adapter for connecting a teleprinter to the modern computer. I know it has been done before, but it might be the motivation for me to learn something new. Recently I bought this AVR64DU32 board and I'm slowly working on the simplest code for it.

A printed circuit board, MIE-60. On the board there are small logic integrated circuits and four programmable components.

A printed circuit board KNGMD from soviet made computer. In the board there are a lot of integrated circuits. Board has four gold coated card edge connectors.

A printed circuit board with lots of badly soldered wires and a ceramic gold controller IC.

A simple printed circuit board with four resistor arrays and two connectors.

Got some good stuff from the technotrash! An LSI-11 compatible controller cards - HPIB, floppy drive, horifying serial port and some mysterious board with connectors and resistor arrays.

Fixed up some minor issues and putting it back together in hopes I won't have to disassemble it again. It comes together nicely and already passes a CAT test.

Today I did some work on fixing the keyboard issues. One button is just dead, one seems to have a failed diode in diode encoder part (prints wrong character), but the issue of it printing only cyrillic characters is somewhere else. Could be ideological, haha.

Fot now I've fixed its PSU, fixed some of the issues in printing mechanics. Next in line is keyboard with several issues. However, there are some signs of life already.

I started this thread on X, but will continue it here too. My restoration project now is the RFT F1100 teleprinter, made in east Germany somewhere in 80's.

Socks is angry.
#cat

Funny ringtone of a VEF TA-D phone made in 1991.

Vivisection of a caller-id phone.

Today I stopped by a fellow enthuaiast and helped him to fix his Facit 4431 terminal video issues. That's a nice, silent terminal with green screen.

Heyoooo, this is me, a retro electronics dude from eastern Europe, Latvia. Data center technician by day, technomancer by night. For now my content will be identical here and on X.