Utah Republican Rep. Rob Bishop is among members of congress embracing a new technology to keep in touch with his constituents: the tele-town hall.

''A lot of other members were doing it, and they had rave reviews for it,'' Bishop said.

Bishop finished the third of three planned tele-town halls this week and said he was turned on to the idea by Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb.

Bishop said he plans only to use the telephone meetings when he is not able to travel back for in-person meetings.

It works like this: The company that coordinates the conference calls hundreds of people in Bishop's district at random and asks whether they would like to participate in a teleconference with Bishop.

People then punch in a code and line up in a virtual ''queue'' to ask a question of their representative and get an answer on the spot.

During a Thursday tele-town hall with Cache County voters, about 150 people were on the line at any given time with Bishop, and more than 300 people participated at some point during the call, said Scott Parker, Bishop's chief of staff.

''For the record, we never have that kind of turnout at regular town hall meetings,'' Parker said in an e-mail.

During Bishop's roughly 90-minute call Thursday night, he answered 25 of the 40 questions asked, which ranged from what Congress is doing to address illegal immigration to the War on Terror.

The callers expressed remarks more candid than those Bishop has received while traveling to the region for in-person meetings.

And though he didn't think so, Bishop's responses were similarly frank.

''I don't know why anyone would actually want to be president. With the kind of crap they take, that must be the most miserable job in the world,'' he said. ''Most public officials get a lot more abuse than what is fair or necessary.''

Bishop also reasserted his support for President Bush's call to send up to 22,500 more troops into Iraq.

Bishop, who called the nation's presence in Iraq ''the most legal justification for American involvement since World War II,'' slammed a measure approved by Democratic lawmakers that calls for a public timeline for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

''There's nothing wrong with having deadlines. The problem is, you don't give them publicly. That's a recipe for catastrophe,'' he said. ''What we need to do in Congress is try to find a way to end the war on the right note.''