Comarco Gets L.A. County Call-Box Order : Technology: Firm’s new, solar-powered, cellular models will replace thousands of aging boxes along freeways.

Comarco Inc. said Thursday that it will supply solar-powered call boxes as replacements for thousands of aging call boxes along Los Angeles County freeways.

The new call boxes, for use by stranded motorists, use cellular technology and don’t need expensive and inefficient phone lines as the old ones do.

But the biggest advantage, Comarco officials said, is that a small computer in the boxes reports when the phone is not working. As many as a third of the 3,800 boxes in Los Angeles are thought to be inoperative at any given time, officials said, but it has been hard to tell which ones weren’t working.

The small computers in the machines call a central computer when there is a breakdown; that computer then dials the California Highway Patrol communications center in Los Angeles to request repairs.

The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission on Wednesday picked a GTE Corp. subsidiary, which Comarco supplies, to replace the old boxes with 4,000 new ones.

The contract to supply, install and maintain the boxes for 10 years is estimated to be worth as much as $15 million, of which Comarco officials say the company will get an amount substantially less than $8 million. GTE installs the machines and maintains them.

Comarco, based in Anaheim, provides engineering, weapons-testing and other services to the federal government and defense industry. It branched out into the call-box technology six years ago.

Los Angeles and New York City are the nation’s only big urban areas with extensive call-box systems. They were installed in the 1950s using underground telephone wires, which are expensive to install and cumbersome to maintain because the road often must be torn up to repair the wires. When built, the system was so expensive that no other big cities adopted it.

But cellular technology, requiring no telephone wires, and the increasing miniaturization of computers has enabled companies to build simpler and more efficient call boxes.

GTE and Comarco, for instance, won the contract to replace 1,000 of New York’s 6,000 call boxes, of which only 2,000 or so are thought to be working at any given time, Comarco says.

Comarco previously won contracts to supply call boxes in Orange and San Diego counties and a few other states. With the Los Angeles contract, Comarco says it now has 90% of the U.S. market.

While Comarco had some rough years--it lost millions on a couple of acquisitions--the company has rebounded recently. It reported earnings of $1.7 million on revenues of $73 million for its latest year.

GTE will start installing the boxes in Los Angeles this summer.