Norstar as a sound monitor

I just recently had a major change in my lifestyle that caused me to investigate how to use my Norstar phone system as a Baby Monitor. This same idea could be applied many ways - not just for listening to sleeping babies.

The idea is very, very simple. You can do this one of two ways:

OPTION #1. simply go to the phone in the space you want to monitor (in my case, the baby's room) and make a hands-free intercom call to the phone where you want to listen from (i.e. the kitchen, garage, front office). It will help if there is someone waiting at that phone to answer it. Then just put the that second phone on hands free also. And there you have it, a direct speaker phone/speaker phone connection. Also, as not to send sound back to the babies room, I mute my HF key.


OPTION #2. This actually my prefered method. I go to the baby's room and press the key for PAGE. Depending on how your phone system is configured you may need to adjust 3 things:
- there will be a page time-out setting in the system programming. You'll want this as long as possible. Ususally 45 mins is max. (on some older systems, it may be indefinite).
- the page button should be programmed to page over "speaker and sets". (Feature * 630)
- The sets that you wish to send page to must all be in at least some page zone and have paging enabled.

The reason I like option#2 is it allows me to traverse the house from room to room (or basement) and I can monitor the babies room phone from any phone I happen to be near.

Now, if you want to get really fancy, you could put only specific phones into a particular page group (let's say page group 3). And then you could target the page broadcast to F*633 (the feature command for paging over speaker & sets on page group 3). This would allow you to exclude phones that didn't need to hear the paging such as another child's room, the living room or other.

Now I know I used the "baby monitoring" example. And, that's because it's something I need right now. But, just think for a minute of the ways this idea could be applied to other situations.

- a front office where the person staffing the front reception area has to go to the back part of the building. If that person were to press the page key on that phone in the front area, he could walk to other parts of the office and still hear the door, door chime, bells, whatever.

In any case, I hope that helps someone.