Pulse Dialing on ADSL!? Is it the goats?

Internet access discussion, including Fusion, IP Broadband, and Gigabit Fiber!
14 posts Page 2 of 2
by wsanders » Sun Mar 12, 2023 7:04 pm
Our main "landline" phone is a recent wireless thing and it works fine on the ATA. That's the only other POTS phone in the house. I have an impressive junk box being a radio amateur but the other POTS phones went to the recycler a long time ago!
by kenberland » Mon Sep 04, 2023 8:49 am
I had the same issue with my 1970's Western Electric Trimline Touchtone model: Tip-Ring polarity reversed. This must be common, because my ATA had a setting for it. Before: dial tone when receiver is lifted, pushing buttons emits no tone; phone rings and receives calls. After: everything works; buttons emit DTMF tones. (Except the backlight. Anyone know how to get that working???)
2023-09-04-08-47-13.png
Screenshot of ATA settings.
2023-09-04-08-47-13.png (219.78 KiB) Viewed 711 times
by virtualmike » Mon Sep 04, 2023 6:01 pm
kenberland wrote:(Except the backlight. Anyone know how to get that working???)
AT&T/Western Electric had two series of Trimline phones. The later series had LEDs in the dialpad to illuminate it, drawing the power from the line current. My Trimline phones were LED-illuminated.

The first series had a small incandescent bulb in the dialpad. It received its power from the second pair of wires, with a wall-wart transformer somewhere in the house near phone wiring. It sounds like you may have that version.

You can check whether a rotary Trimline is an LED model. If it is, it will have "LED" printed under the fingerstop (which moves when dialing, allowing you to see under it). I searched to see if there is a way to check if a Touch-Tone Trimline phone has something similar. I didn't find anything, but on this page, I found this helpful information:
The first Trimline models used incandescent dial lights powered by a power transformer plugged into a standard 120VAC outlet. The bulky transformer and the need for a conveniently-placed 120-volt outlet was criticized by many consumers, but was necessary because of the power demands of the incandescent light bulb. Years later, Western Electric redesigned the Trimline to use a low-power green LED backlit dial powered by current from the phone line, eliminating the need for a separate transformer. Always eager to re-use its older stocks of turned-in rental phones, AT&T later repainted and sold early-model non-LED Trimlines as “non-lighted” models, without a transformer.
by rcoaster » Mon Sep 18, 2023 3:59 pm
wsanders wrote:I have an ancient dialup phone (the same one I had nearly 50 years ago in my college dorm room!) and it does not work on Fusion (with 2 line ATT DSL and Sonic's VoIP dongle), but because of its power requirements rather than its pulse dialing. I don't even get a dial tone. So YMMV.
Older analog phones should not require "higher power" than more-recent ones; I have a 1920s Western Electric 50AL candlestick phone and a 1920s/30s Western Electric B1 desk phone (sometimes called a "102") with 534/634 subsets on my Fusion ADSL line, and both work fine (and they also both ring, along with a 1989 ITT 2500 phone). My Fusion line is the "real Sonic" one, not the re-sold AT&T U-verse one, though.

The phone itself could have a problem, especially if it was not used since the 1970s. Try it on another wired phone line elsewhere if you can.
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