🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <22020@cup.portal.com> Lou@cup.portal.com (William Joseph Marriott) writes:
>I have a problem that's cropped up only recently.
>
>When I dial, there is a small pause after the modem completes
>its dialing sequence and before it actually connects with the other
>computer. In that pause, I hear music, news, weather reports, etc.
>coming out of the modem's speaker. Apparently this stuff is from
>a radio station (as opposed to aliens or KGB agents).

I had this problem once.  I lived about a mile from a powerful rock
music station in Knoxville, Tennessee.  The station was strong enough
that sometimes I could hear it very faintly on my stereo record
player, with the record player not even plugged in!  (No, I don't
believe in magic; I believe it was the piezoelectric crystal in the
needle responding to currents induced in the wiring.)

You didn't say whether you could use the modem.  I got so many errors
I could seldom even log in, and even when I could, the line quality
was so poor it wasn't worth the effort.  We're talking really, really
unusable here.

I called Ma Bell (as I recall, this was when the grand old lady still
lived).  At that time, and probably still, the phone company tried to
give you good speech lines, but if you had computer problems that was
your tough luck.

Fortunately, I could (sometimes) hear the music on my telephone, so I
had a case for getting a telephone person out to the house.  Doubly
fortunately, I got a competent young guy who took an interest in my
real problem, and spend half a day working on it.  There are filters
that the phone company can put on your line to screen out the radio
station; he did so, and they didn't work.  Then there are real,
industrial-strength filters that the phone company has but doesn't
want to give you (or even let you know they exist); he used one that
finally got one phone jack in my house useable.

After that, the modem for my Apple II+ worked great, and an acoustic
modem I used with a VDT worked pretty well most of the time, provided
I used that one wall jack.

  -- dave

P.S.  Psychiatry seldom solves anything.  Lobotomy, now....


-- Dave Matuszek (dave@prc.unisys.com)
-- Unisys Corp. / Paoli Research Center / PO Box 517 / Paoli PA  19301
-- Any resemblance between my opinions and those of my employer is improbable.
* 20th anniversary?  Yeah, but it's 17 years since the LAST man on the moon! *