phone line wierdness

A dirty electrical connection can be cleaned by passing current through it. An "onhook" telephone results in zero current flowing in the phone line's pair of wires.

I have a similar problem on my line. It frequently gets noisy due to a bad connection somewhere in the loop. I find that the best way to fix the problem is to get my phone to ring and pick it up in the middle of the ringing. This causes a fairly high current to flow (for a short amount of time). This always (temporarily) fixes the noise.

Bob

The cruise control on my Pathfinder does the same thing.

It will not turn on until you blow the horn.

Turns out there are two distinct types of miiature toggle switches. Those that are rated for lots of current and those that are specially plated for dry switching but only rated to 0.5 va.

We have both up on eBay under abeja and it is a pain to carefully spell out which is which.

Don, That's a safety feature to warn the world that you're about to enter the highway ;-)

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |

yeah, they call it a bad connection!

Turning on your Cruise Control sets off the air raid sirens in three counties. ;-)

thx

actually now that i think about it; i've had experiences where using the telephone improves the broadband. ie makes it work ok temporarily.

ive since been told in other places. that the reason it possibly magically fixes itself is because water is getting in somewhere on the line outside and then drying up a few days later.

is there some reason why i can have no dial tone but incoming calls still ring. something to do with the two wires?

thx

Water ingress will result in severe hum at the very least. In worst case will cause total failure to make/receive calls.

Most likely cause is dirty or poor contact in the switch-hook springset. This is also the most likely cause of the symptoms noted by the OP, but not the only possibility. It is not unknown for the cord connectors at either the phone or wall outlet to also develop poor or intermittent connection.

The ring signal is about 70 VAC. The dial tone is much lower.

First, if you eliminate your phone itself and your internal house wiring as the source of the problem, then call the phone company - if the neighbors' phone is out, you might have to go find one, but if your neighbors' phone is out, that's a pretty sure sign it's the phone company's wires. :-)

Everything up to your junction box is their responsibility, and if they have an intermittent line, they will want to know about it, because depending on the nature of the fault, it could be costing them money.

Good Luck! Rich

hi

i've taken the phone round to my parents house; it works fine there. my internal wiring consists of entry at front of house, fairly old wiring that goes under carpet of small room to the hall to a master socket and a bt installed filtered faceplate. same problem if i take the faceplate off and use the test socket. i have no other wiring.

im inclined to go with water ingress as by the time i went to bed last night it had improved slightly. i could vaguely hear the dial tone under all the static. its rained overnight and now i lift the handset and theres nothing again.

i've had this problem for a few months. it's gotten a lot worse since new year extreme winds. before new year it really only affected my broadband. because its difficult to know what happening when im asleep or at work i made a vbscript that captures my router stats every minute and logs them.

my normal working stats are (gives me around 5mbit) Status,date,time,ping,UP Sync,Down Sync,US Margin,DS Margin,LOS errors,DS Attenuation,US Attenuation,Path mode UP!,29/12/2006,14:45:41,65ms,448,7552,27,15,0,15,13,Interleaved

current stats are UP!,06/01/2007,11:34:29,54ms,352,160,6,0,0,45,63,Interleaved

was rate adapted to 128kbit on 4/1 6pm had 30mins downtime i didnt notice at the time.

got an engineer coming round tomorrow morning anyways so hopefully it can get sorted once and for all.

regards

andy

Under carpet wiring, unless carried out with cable designed specifically for that purpose, is a suspect for wiring damage.

If it were water ingress you would experience severe hum more-so than static. Your description of the symptoms definitely rules out water ingress.

Static alone indicates an intermittent connection at some point in either the phone or the wiring.

You need to determine whether the wiring or the phone is the problem. I see that you took your phone to another house and it seemed ok. Depending upon how long you ran that test it may or may not be a legitimate indicator given that you have previously boted that the symptoms seem to disappear for some period when the phone is in your house. I would suggest that you temporarily string a new piece of cable from your boundary point connection into the house and connect it to your phone and broadband connections for a period of 24 hours or so. If you experience no problems then you know the house wiring is to blame. You then need to get it re-wired.

There's your fault. It's the wire under the carpet.

And please learn to bottom-post.

Good Luck! Rich