Doing Business / FREEWAY CALL BOXES : Providing Help for Stranded Motorists

It’s late at night. You’re on Interstate 5, miles from home. All of a sudden, you hear a loud pop and then a hisssss . You pull over to the shoulder and walk to a call box to summon help.

If you find yourself stranded on a Los Angeles or Orange County freeway, the call boxes that you use to call for help were probably manufactured locally by Comarco Inc., an Anaheim company best known for performing engineering and weapons-testing services for the federal government and defense industry.

Comarco’s solar-powered, cellular call boxes are assembled one at a time by work groups. Using the group method rather than mass-producing the boxes in subassemblies, company officials say, is more efficient, cost-effective and results in fewer product defects because the production process is tightly controlled by the individual teams.

Comarco is the nation’s leading supplier of cellular call boxes. GTE Corp. installs and maintains the boxes supplied by Comarco. The Anaheim firm also makes a Network Evaluation System that is used by cellular telephone companies to test the quality and strength of their signals, so they can reduce the incidents of fade-outs or hang-ups for their customers.