New Zealand Phonecards Trial Issue

The above five cards were produced for the trial of the GPT system of phonecards in New Zealand. Two military installations were chosen as the trial sites, as these sites were both considered controllable because of their restricted nature. They were Burnham Military Camp and Wigram Air Force Base, both located near Christchurch.

The cards were produced in sheets of 56 (7x8) with various numbers of each denomination. Below is an example of a sheet and I have shown the layout of each value.

50	50	10	10	10	10	10
50	10	10	10	10	10	10
2	20	20	20	20	20	20
2	2	2	2	2	2	2
2	2	2	2	2	2	2
2	2	2	2	2	2	2
5	5	5	5	5	5	5
5	5	5	5	5	5	5

This gave 22 x $2, 14 x $5, 11 x $10, 6 x $20 and 3 x $50 per sheet.

Approximately 1,300+ sheets were produced and cut to produce the individual cards. A large number of these cards were never used and subsequently they were destroyed, leaving the quantities listed at the top of the page as the actual numbers issued. Most of the cards in circulation today are used, leaving very few mint copies, especially the $50 card.

There were 10 additional sheets produced. The back of these sheets is completely white, with no other markings. Eight of these sheets were given to various top Telecom employees and other companies. Two sheets were cut up and used for promotional work. A few of these individual cards are in the hands of private collectors.

This is an example of the $10 card from one of the two cut sheets. The back is white and there is no notch.

All the issued cards were produced with the deep blindman's notch, and as it turns out, this was the only issue to have this particular style of notch. All other issues had a shallower notch. However, there are a few reporting's of the $5 card in the 1989 First Satellites Issue having this deep notch. See 1989 First Satellites Issue for example of this card.

Each card was sold in a small cardboard wrapper, illustrated above, of which two different printings are known. The first used thin, white, shiny cardboard, while the second was thicker, off-white and less shiny.

There were 60 presentation packs produced. They contained the five cards plus a printed card commemorating the Trial Issue. The majority of these were presented to Telecom Officials and Defence Force Personnel. There are two different known versions of this pack. One has rounded gold corners, while the other has square.

TRIAL ISSUE