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Spendex 50
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Spendex 50 (UA-8246)
Digital Wide-band Secure Terminal - Wanted item

Spendex-50 is an advanced secure digital speech and data terminal, developed in the early 1980s by Philips Usfa in Eindhoven (Netherlands) for the Dutch Armed Forces as part the ZODIAC tactical digital integrated communications network. It is known by the Dutch Army as Digitaal Beveiligd Telefoontoestel (Digital Secure Phone) or DBT. It is also known by its Philips Usfa designator UA-8246 and as NSN 5805-17-055-9132. Approximately 750 units were built.

The phone is housed in a ruggedized military-grade die-cast aluminium case. All controls are at the top surface. It has a 16-button key-pad with a red LED-display directly above it. To the right of the display is a sealed red flap that hides the ZEROIZE button.

At the right-rear are the two terminals for connection to a 2-wire telephone network. At the bottom right is the power input (24V). The image on the right shows a typical Spendex-50 unit, with the CIK present (rear) and the handset (left) locked in place with a rubber strap [1].
Spendex-50 courtesy of Mathieu Goudsmits [1]

Spendex-50 was a wide-band terminal, allowing speech and computer data to be sent securely at 16 kbits/sec. All speech data was digitised using Delta Modulation (CVSD), which was also used with the narrow-band Spendex-10 ten years earlier. It communicated with the outside world through a 2-wire Conditioned Biphase Signalling (CDS) line interface, consisting of an interwoven data and a signalling path. For signalling, it exchanged Cyclic Permutable Codewords (CPC) with the digital telephone exchange (switch) [2].

For its time, Spendex-50 was a very advanced piece of equipment. Initially the Dutch Army had ordered 1500 units, but given their high price (approx. 20,000 Euro in 1983) the order was reduced to a mere 750 units. Spendex-50 entered service in 1987 and was decommissioned in the early 2000s when ZODIAC was replaced by TITAAN. It has since become a rare find.