Dear JWR:
In the 19 March Odds ‘n Sods you noted that:
Ready Made Resources just got in another small batch of 1000-foot long rolls of WF-16/U (2-pair) commo wire.This type of wire is fairly scarce on the surplus market. It can be used with TA-1s, TA-312s, and the newer TA-1042 (DNVT) digital field telephones.
Just so, and WF-16/U works as well with the older and long-standard pre-WWII through Vietnam era EE-8 “bag phones”.which my maternal grandparent helped develop while a Signal Corps officer at Ft. Monmouth.The old double-E-Eight is also compatible with the TA-1 and TA-312, though I’ve never tried one with DNVT equipment. They will however also function with the surplus early German field telephone equipment also in use from WWII to the 1980s [we had one in our bunker on the West German side of the five-kilometer militarized zone on the Iron Curtain in 1982, and very much still in use in the Balkans and elsewhere. The German units are available from Cheaper Than Dirt as their item # KEY123 for around $60 a pair.
TA-312 Field Phones are available from Fair Radio [ http://www.fairradio.com/ ]as their item # 3856 for $110 each, and they have in the past had parts and WD1-TT wire for the EE-8s as well. My own pair of EE-8s came from the Dayton, Ohio Hamfest, probably originally from Fair Radio.
Cheers! – Archy