GE Answering Machine Auto Hangup Adjustment

I have a GE speakerphone/answering machine made by ATLINKS USA, model 29897GE2-A. Now that I have a DSL filter, surge suppressor, and a FAX/modem board between the phone and the wall, its auto-hangup feature prevents it from ever taking a message: it concludes someone has picked up a phone and hangs up immediately after it picks up, without even playing my greeting. Bypassing either the DSL filter or the surge suppressor allows the machine to work properly, but neither of those situations is viable for anything more than brief experiment.

Does anyone know where I might find a schematic diagram, service manual, or other information that might help me find a way to adjust the auto-hangup threshold? If it helps, ATLINKS USA claims to be a subsidiary of Thomson.

Thanks!

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Greg Thoman:  The opinions expressed herein are mine alone, and I am
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Greg Thoman
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Ummm... have you tried contacting the mfr????????

Customer Service

When you purchase a GE phone, you can count on receiving the support you need should any questions or concerns arise. Our customer support team is ready to assist you with any needs you may have. For customer service assistance, dial 1.800.448.0329, Contact Us via Email or, if you prefer, write to us at Thomson, Inc. P.O. Box 671988 Marietta, GA 30006-0034

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Dave M
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DaveM

the

goes.- Hide quoted text -

Wow !! Customer Assistance without asking directly for it ! GE must take good care of it's employee's.

Reply to
carneyke

Remove the surge protector and telephone line is still fully protected. Did someone forget to mention the superior telephone line protector is installed by the telco - for free? You have assumed surge protector means surge protection. It does not. A surge protector is a connecting device to surge protection. That protection is earth ground. Notice the telephone line protector is connected to earth. Your plug-in protector is not connected to earth (wire length excessive).

You need the DSL filter. Apparently the modem is nothing more than a direct connection to the answering machine. And your phone line is protected by the same superior protector that the telco also installs on their computer (at the other end of your phone line). They don't shutdown and disconnect during thunderstorms because their earthed protector is so effective as to make hundreds of surges during every thunderstorm irrelevant. You have the same type protector. But that protector is only as effective as the earth ground that you have provided.

Protection effectiveness is only as good as its earth ground. Solve your problem by eliminating that unearthed protector. Make protection more effective by verifying earthing for the telco 'installed for free' protector.

Reply to
w_tom

You really love the word protect/er/ed/ion don't you?

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Reply to
Meat Plow

For accurate information on surges and surge protection try an IEEE guide at:

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Or a similar NIST guide at:
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The NIST guide is easily read. The IEEE guide requires some technical background but would be an easy read for people here.

Nonsense. Both the IEEE and NIST guides say plug-in suppressors are effective.

Note that all interconnected equipment needs to be connected to the same plug-in suppressor, or interconnecting wires should go through the suppressor. External connections, like phone, cable TV, should also need to go through the protector. Connecting all wiring through the suppressor prevents damaging voltages such as between power and phone wires.

w_ has a religious belief (immune from challenge) in earthing. Since plug-in suppressors do not work by earthing he believes they cannot possibly work. But the IEEE guide explains they primarily work by CLAMPING the voltage on all wires (power and signal) to the common ground at the suppressor.

Both the IEEE and NIST guides say plug-in suppressors are effective.

w_ has never posted a link to a source that says plug-in suppressors are NOT effective.

-- bud--

Reply to
Bud--

Bud has finally arrived. Good. View his citation Adobe page 42 Figure 8. Figure 8 demonstrates how a protector earths surges, 8000 volts destructively, through an adjacent TV.

Same may happen with a protector adjacent to an answering machine. Why does your telco not use plug-in protectors on their end of the line? Plug-in protectors without that 'less than 10 foot' connection to earth ground - as in Figure 8 - may contribute to $multi-million switching computer damage. Telco wants effective protectors.

In your case, a NID protector would be inside a box that looks like:

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Is your NID connected short to earth? Then telephone line already has surge protection. Page 42 Figure 8 is what happens when a plug-in protector is too close to transistors and too far from earth ground. Notice the adjacent protector has no dedicated earthing wire and does not discuss earthing? Responsible organizations such as the IEEE and NIST demand earthing for protection.

Remove that ineffective plug-in protector so that answering machine will take messages. Inspect NID earthing wire so that real world protection exists on your phone line. Then learn about the most common source of answering machine damage - AC electric - which also requires an earthed 'whole house' protector.

Reply to
w_tom

Bud has finally arrived. Good. View his citation Adobe page 42 Figure 8. Figure 8 demonstrates how a protector earths surges, 8000 volts destructively, through an adjacent TV.

Same may happen with a protector adjacent to an answering machine. Why does your telco not use plug-in protectors on their end of the line? Plug-in protectors without that 'less than 10 foot' connection to earth ground - as in Figure 8 - may contribute to $multi-million switching computer damage. Telco wants effective protectors.

In your case, a NID protector would be inside a box that looks like:

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Is your NID connected short to earth? Then telephone line already has surge protection. Page 42 Figure 8 is what happens when a plug-in protector is too close to transistors and too far from earth ground. Notice the adjacent protector has no dedicated earthing wire and does not discuss earthing? Responsible organizations such as the IEEE and NIST demand earthing for protection.

Remove that ineffective plug-in protector so that answering machine will take messages. Inspect NID earthing wire so that real world protection exists on your phone line. Then learn about the most common source of answering machine damage - AC electric - which also requires an earthed 'whole house' protector.

Reply to
w_tom

USA,

and

without

service

It may be the GE phone itself. Here is what one reviewer had to say about this phone (very bottom of page)

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I note the price has been cut way down probably due to the complaints it has generated.

Insofar as inline surge suppressors are concerned I doubt their effectiveness. For starters they are not going to provide any protection from mains voltage caused by insulation breakdown to mains voltages since there is just too much energy dissipated in the protection devices and they just cook and then pass the surge onto the equipment trying to be protected. Provided your telephone line is underground all the way from the exchange you should not require a surge protector. In lightning prone areas the only place to put a telco approved surge protector is at the line demarcation point for the house with a short earth cable to a separate ground stake.

Some DSL filters (particularly ADSL+) do not provide a guaranteed level of isolation from the telephone line side and this may be your problem. Read this manufacturers guff on DSL filters and have a look at the faq. The fact that it is an Aus company doesn't matter, it applies universally to ADSL all over.

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Reply to
Ross Herbert

[The diagram shows a surge on a CATV cable and 2 TVs, TV1 has a plug- in suppressor.]

With minimal ability to think, just looking at the pretty picture shows "the protector" reduces the surge voltage at the 2nd TV from

10,000V to 8,000V - it does not "earth surges ... through the adjacent TV" - which is not adjacent.

Adding an ability to read, the point of the illustration is "to protect TV2, a second multiport protector located at TV2 is required".

And the IEEE guide says plug-in suppressors are effective.

A religious belief in earthing prevents w_ from understanding the IEEE or NIST guides. The IEEE guide explains plug-in suppressors work primarily by CLAMPING the voltage on all wires (power and signal) to the common ground at the suppressor. They do not work primarily by earthing.

And the IEEE and NIST guides, published by the IEEE and NIST, both say plug-in suppressors are effective.

There are 98,615,938 web sites, including 13,843,032 by lunatics, and w_ can't find another lunatic that says plug-in suppressors are NOT effective. All you have are distortions and w_'s opinions based religious belief.

-- bud--

Reply to
bud--

i wholly agree with the jist of this chunk of msgs. epescially after i had a very exciting session with a lightning strike that wended its way through my house wiring system during a 2006 summer storm.

it hit first the trees nearby, abt 40 yds away, singing a good 40 feet of bark and blowing it right off the tree trunk. from there, the energy traveled through underground piping, over to my house.

it also induced a nice pulse into an unconnected coiled up extension cable at the neighbors house, nicely melting and fusing the yellow insulation until the cable was rendered useless. that was laying completely clear upon his porch deck, nothing else was singed or damaged. no eveidence of any tracing across the deck either!

the above ground pole mounted, phone line, cable tv, and 13kv lines accepted a nice energy pulse from the lightning also, thence connected itself to my phones, tv, and generall power in the house.

phones went dead, cable tv went dead, and other than a slight snapping/pop noise somewhere inside the house, no other seeming problems. a cursory check for internal house fires went with no problems

after all the repair crews arrived, fixed and rendered my home useable again, all seemed satisfactory. that took 3 days to happen, it was a BAD storm!

as the fall months passed, i went about my usual winter weather preparation checks.

all was nornal, UNTIL, i went to check some rarely used fuses that protect a rarely used heating system to prevent my water lines from freezing during the winter. there i found the old glass screw in fuse cartridges blown to smitherines, as if a charge of c4 had been inserted inside the glass and left to pulverise at some unknown time. that now explained the pop/snap i heard during the lightning strike.

i was unable to discern the path the strike has traversed to gain access to this particular fuse box, until i found >>

an UNSECURED TELEPHONE LINE EARTH GROUND on the water pipe.

clearly there was arcing blackness and copper melted here, BAD BAD BAD!

so there was the perfect scenario for losing all protection capacity for all the surge devices that were installed, they were rendere USELESS only because the prime component ( a complete and patent EARTH GROUND) they required was not there.

even the telco protectors relied on this single ground point,, BAD BAD BAD!

after securely re-screwing the size 8 solid copper ground wire back into the pipe clamp, i went about as usual.

have since had multiple lighning strikes nearby, but have never had any subsequent phone or cable tv disruptions since.

i will plant a few extra ground rods and run some extra ground cables, some day, ummmmm, someday......

Reply to
<hapticz

After finding no info that would help with modifying the phone's, built-in answering machine, I pursued other approaches.

First, I shopped for answering machines. I was unable to find one that lacked the "hang up if another line picked up" feature, usually referred to as "call screening/intercept". A suitably old one from a garage sale or thrift shop would have done the job, but I didn't care to search too hard.

Next, I decided to investigate the resistance of the DSL filter. Turns out, my 2Wire brand filter has just under 10 ohms per wire (just under 20 ohms loop). I was unable to find evidence of a DSL filter having lower resistance (and some claims of up to 100 ohms!), so I concluded replacing the DSL filter wasn't a likely candidate for success.

Next, I "went shopping for ohms": I measured the resistance of each wire of every phone cord involved. The eye-opener was the cord that had come with the GE speakerphone/answering machine: my DMM claimed 2 ohms per wire (4 ohms loop), so I promptly replaced the cord with one having less than an ohm per wire. That wasn't good enough.

Finally, I moved the DSL filter from the wall jack to the output jack of my surge suppressor, used the DSL modem's heavy-duty cord for the run from wall to surge suppressor, and used a short "ordinary" patch cord from the unfiltered output of the DSL filter to the DSL modem (similar cord from filtered output to modem, phone plugged into modem as before).

Whew! The answering machine now works, and the DSL modem barely noticed that there's now a surge suppressor between it and the wall (biggest signal level change was a couple dB on the "uncanceled echo"). Note that this likely won't be true for all surge suppressors; I suspect I got lucky.

Thus, when all else failed, changing to the lowest-resistance phone cords I could lay my hands on was just enough to do the job.

Later!

--
Greg Thoman:  The opinions expressed herein are mine alone, and I am
         solely irresponsible for them.
Reply to
Greg Thoman

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