Getting a cell phone to work with an answering machine?

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Before you dismiss the idea by saying, “Why bother: cell phone plans have voicemail, anyway,” please read on.

Where I live (Honduras), the cell-phone companies also have “fixed-telephone” service. Essentially, it is the same thing as a cell phone, but larger, and designed to be used on a desktop. Unfortunately, the “fixed-telephone” packages do not even have the option of the voicemail features of a regular cell-phone plan. In addition, those desktop phones don’t have any external jacks to allow connecting a regular phone or answering machine.

Thus, I’d like to know if it’s possible to hack such a phone to allow the use of an answering machine, and I discovered your “Port-O-Rotary” as I was googling for ideas on how to accomplish this.

Unless I’m missing something, here are the things that such a hack would have to do:

  • - Have an RJ11 jack for connecting the answering machine

  • - Generate a ring signal to that jack when an incoming call arrives
  • - When the answering machine picks up, establish the cellular connection and patch outbound (for the outgoing message) and inbound (for the caller's message) audio between the jack and the cellular
  • - Detect the end of the call (whether the answering machine hangs up after allowing a message of a certain length, or the caller hangs up) and terminate the patch between the jack and the cellular
    • If not possible through a standard jack, perhaps it could be done with wires from the cellular to the answering machine and connected in the right places, but the general operation would be about the same.

    Any ideas how this could be done? Do you already have something like this? Do you know where I could find something like this, of the plans for making it?

    Thanks!