Panasonic KX-TD816 PABX/PBX (also KX-TD1232)

I've bought this small PBX for my office. While not exactly needed, it can still be useful for a thing or two. This page compiles knowledge and information on this unit that I've been collecting around.

Now, this is a fairly old unit, and a proprietary one at it. Not only information is hard to come by, as the old folks tend to be little protective of their knowledge. Sometimes I find people saying on the forums «I have it, but you have to get it directly from Panasonic» or even the infamous «Sent you via PM.» Some manuals, software and documents are terribly difficult to come by. There are even some old and suspect websites (like diagrams.ua) trying to sell schematics.

Still, I managed to find some stuff, and I'm sharing it here, should someone want to run this old thing in the future.

Nomenclatures

Panasonic has terms for some stuff. Some are pretty standard, some are their own thing.

Term	Acronym meaning	Meaning
IRNA	Intercept Routing — No Answer
KSU	Key Service Unit	Another name for the PBX central box, fairly industry standard
PT/APT/DPT	[Analogue\Digital] Proprietary Telephone	A telephone set made specifically for those PABX's
SLT	Single Line Telephone	Any standard landline telephone
XDP	eXtra Device Port	On certain models (all of them Digital), allows for a SLT to be connected to the analogue wiring, acting as a completely independent station

My unit

My PBX is particularly of the KX-TD816BX model. It sports a KX-TD170 expansion for eight more extensions. Since I have no use for it, it's disconnected. It's also impossible to find it's service manual. You'll see it mentioned in a maze of old websites trying to sell it. But I wouldn't bet any money on even being able to contact those people.

There's a service manual for the UK offering, KX-TD816E. But it's quite different from mine. While it obviously shares some design premises, it's quite different. The motherboard is completely different, the CPU board is in a different location and there's even stuff it got that mine doesn't, like dual pager and dual music source, as well as built-in door-phone card.

There are also service manuals for KX-TD1232E, CE, AL et al. and KX-TA1232. While the design is different both between bigger or smaller brothers (816 vs 1232) and between regional versions, the core design is more or less the same, as discussed at this page on that same Wiki.

I'm compiling some information on the hardware here, but it is still a work in progress.

My unit with a KX-T7230X DPT and a Intelbras SLT

Model suffixes

Both TD816 and TD1232 got a lot of versions. Some are newer revisions, some are built for international markets. A friend of mine thinks it got to do with the wildly diverse world of telephonic systems, and it's probably true, but I live in Brazil, and, thus far, I've seen this BX unit, that, according to the «British Telephones» website, is focused for the Asian market, and also a KX-TD1232 unit being sold on OLX (as well in another site), of the «X» variant.

X, by the way, means international market. I'd not lose my sleep over those suffixes, but the fact is that some systems can be quite different from others with the same name, depending on the local market they were built for, and frequently, service manuals made for one won't be adequate for another.

As for Brazil, Googles returns nothing for TD816 with the BR suffix, and there's a single result mentioning the BR variant for TD1232 model. If this model really exists, I don't envy the luck of someone who'll have to maintain it. The sellers of one of the add-ons I bought said he worked with a lot of «BR» models, specially the TD1232BR, since the price difference between the two units were, at the time, minimal.

KX-TD1232RU, for example, seems to be similar to TD1232CE and some of it's firmwares have Russian as the default language. My unit, which is a TD816BX got two languages: English (default) and French, which doesn't look very Asian market to me, but okay. TD816E, for the British market, is wildly different and also include some features onboard, like the doorphone adapter.

Resources

KX-TA1232/KX-TD816/KX-TD1232 resources

Other stuff

Paralleled Telephone connection

As per this reference:

XDP feature must be turned off in Program 600.

The most common example is to plug a cordless phone into the XDP port of your digital phone (7200 or 7400 series). When your extension is called, both phones ring and can be answered. In order for your single-line phone to ring you must do the following:

INTERCOM 391 To turn on parallel ring (INTERCOM 390 to cancel) and the AUTO ANSWER light must be off. BGM must be turned off.

Another example is to plug your laptop or computer modem into the XDP port and use OUTLOOK or another contact software program to make calls. If you have problems making the connection, look for the dialing properties in your program and set it to "Don't look for dial tone, just dial." Set parallel ring to off (INTERCOM 390).

The manuals doesn't seem to be very clear about this. It mentions the ring activation on the PT's configuration, but you have to dial 391 to actually enable the SLT paralleled connection.

This arrangement may be useful in situations in which you want everything in a room, for example, to answer to the same extension number. Otherwise you would have to configure a extension group, and each extension can only be assigned to one.

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