Patent ID: 7920539

Claim:
A drive-up quick service establishment communication system for use by a merchant facility having a building and an external adjacent service lane outside of the building to provide communication among a customer located at the service lane and at least four service personnel located within the building, at least one of the service personnel can be an order taker, comprising: a single base station disposed within the building; at least four mobile transceivers disposed within the building for use by the service personnel, sharing a single radio link with the base station to simultaneously communicate in a wireless, digital, full-duplex voice communication manner with each other and with the customer in the service lane; a service point disposed at the service lane and coupled to the base station for communicating with the mobile transceivers to enable audio communication between the customer in the service lane and the service personnel in the building; the base station including a single transceiver for providing full-duplex voice communication with the mobile transceivers in a simultaneous full duplex mode of operation using TDMA and a number of transmit/receive time slots; wherein the base station manages the time slots and routes and combines voice messages to provide a full-duplex party line intercom or full-duplex private line communications or both with the mobile transceivers or between mobile transceivers; at least one mobile transceiver being capable of initiating a voice transmission during a time slot assigned by the base station upon request of the at least one mobile transceiver on a transmit time to the base station transceiver on a single frequency shared with all mobile transceivers; wherein the base station routes and combines the voice signal from the at least one mobile transceiver for retransmission to all other mobile transceivers or a specific transceiver selectively; one or more of the mobile transceivers used for order taking purposes being capable of full-duplex voice communication with the customer and with the other mobile transceivers; each of the mobile transceivers of the service personnel being capable of serving as an order taking transceiver to communicate with the customer via the service point, and alternatively being capable of receiving voice messages only for listening in full-duplex to the voice communication between order taking transceivers and the service point; wherein the radio link is a full-duplex time division duplex arrangement; and whereby the base station provides selectively a first full-duplex channel of pa line communication between the service the mobile transceivers and a second full-duplex channel of party line communication between the mobile transceivers only to the exclusion of the service point.